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HPX-2000 ftg with AVC board
OK, ladies and gents, I set up and shot some footage with my 2000 and the AVC codec, and FCP does NOT import it. It doesn’t even show up in teh log and transfer window. P2CMS will see the clips, but will not play them back. I am shooting some more footage in the studio because we are having a problem with noisy gradients and really noisy blacks on our camera that I need to figure out as well. I will post some frame grabs when I figure out how I can include them in my post, or just whup up a page and stick it into the back of our website for you.
More later-
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8 Replies
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Just found out, you need an Intel based mac to read this codec. Alas, I am still stuck with a PPC. Need to hijack the boss’s quad core tomorrow for further testing….
More to come
Matt
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Ok, retract that last statement, I used thebosses computer last night, and his Intel system didn’t see the clips either, so it appears that AVC is out of range of FCP for now.
matt
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Hi Matt.
Thanks for sharing your findings – great to finally have it confirmed what you can/can’t do with AVC-Intra and Final Cut Pro.
You mention in another thread that you did manage to get the footage into Final Cut Pro by digitising through the SDI out on the camera, which sounds like a good work-around until FCP supports the codec natively.
Two things occur to me:
As documentary-makers, we shoot a lot of material and are often away from base for long periods. We couldn’t possibly afford enough P2 cards to avoid offloading and re-using them in the field. If we copy the P2 volumes onto portable drives so we can re-use the P2 cards, do you know if it’s possible to later transfer back from the drives to the P2 cards in order to digitise in from the camera as you describe?
Secondly, as I understand it, AVC-Intra is an H264-based format. I would guess that, if you could somehow extract the data stream from the P2 MXF files, it theoretically should open in Quicktime, from where it could be transcoded to ProRes or another codec that FCP understands. Does anyone have any idea of some software which can unpack MXF files, without unnecessarily being able to understand their contents?
Cheers,
Jim
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[jimdumm] “f we copy the P2 volumes onto portable drives so we can re-use the P2 cards, do you know if it’s possible to later transfer back from the drives to the P2 cards in order to digitise in from the camera as you describe?”
A risky venture, indeed. I wouldn’t attempt it without much testing and verification that it would work. Interesting Idea, though….
[jimdumm] “Does anyone have any idea of some software which can unpack MXF files, without unnecessarily being able to understand their contents?”
Another interesting idea, one wonders if it is worth the effort. That sounds like it would take some amazing programming tomfoolery, and again, wouldn’t attempt it without much backups. I would think that there are more capable programmers that understand QT wrappers and MXF data layouts that would be able to chime in if this would be possible. It seems, though, that the Raylight people have this problem at least halfway solved.
lest we forget that the reason we love P2 is because of the shortened ingestion times vs tape. I hate digitizing, and as long as I remember that, i will be eternally happy and gratefull to Panasonic for that workflow (and Apple, I suppose…). All the other things, new codecs, bigger cards, cool cameras (except for the HPX2000 being a battery hog) are all just icing on the cake for me. Its good icing, though, and I look forward to more….
Matt
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[jimdumm] “Does anyone have any idea of some software which can unpack MXF files, without unnecessarily being able to understand their contents?”
Raylight Mac will have support for AVC-Intra. Not sure exactly when, though. Just as you suggest it may initially present it as an I-frame only H.264 quicktime.
You might need a quad core+ to play it back real time, since the H.264 gets a lot of its speed by not having to decode a full frame each time.
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Thanks for the suggestion. It’s great that Raylight will support the codec in the future, but right now there doesn’t seem to be any software that can handle AVC Intra.
The current projection for support in Final Cut is apparently “around Christmas”.
Cheers,
Jim
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Thanks for your thoughts Matt.
You’re right that this is all a major effort, but it’s only intended to be a temporary measure until Final Cut supports AVC Intra. At the moment, we’re using the Firestore which is a real pain for the cameraman – having the camera tethered to that thing doesn’t give him the same freedom of movement that he’s used to. It also adds another possible point of failure in the field.
Anyway, if being able to jam twice as much onto a P2 card makes it realistic for us to move away from the Firestore, AVC Intra is probably worth the palaver.
Incidentally, concerning your suggestion that “the reason we love P2” is the shortened ingestion times: I have to say that I really do not love P2. In theory it’s great but in practice
I find that by the time we’ve transferred the P2 data from the Firestore to a firewire drive, and then made a backup, and then brought those drives back to base and transferred them to our RAID for editing, its no faster than real-time capture from tape. And that’s before you even get into how to archive the stuff…Tapeless capture is clearly the future, but in my opinion, it’s not there quite yet.
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Hi Matt.
Now that Apple have released FCP 6.0.2, have you had any luck importing AVC Intra?
I’m slightly mystified as to why it’s necessary to download the codec from Panasonic in addition to the Apple update, and in fact I can’t find the Panasonic download anywhere. Sounds suspiciously like Apple are releasing something that won’t actually support FCP importing AVC Intra but allows them to blame the fact that it doesn’t on Panasonic. Or have I got the wrong end of the stick?
Anyway, I’d love to know if anyone’s had any luck getting it working…
Cheers,
Jim
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