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“MXF-aware” search engines and P2 workflow
First of all thanks to Jeremy for the great MXF4MAC tutorial. Super info. During the course of the tutorial Jeremy emphasizes the importance of metadata and the possibility to then search it to find specific shots in the future. He uses a term “MXF aware” search engines if you back up to LTO. That is what our shop is planning to do and was wondering if you or anybody can share what is working for them.
On the editing side:
The MF4Mac is a great idea but kind of pricey… How is it better from “Calibrated Software” which I think is free? Anybody know if this capability will be offered in future updates of FCP? Seems like it would have to be.Dual 2.7 GHz G5, 4GB RAM, ATI Radeon 9650, Xserve RAID, AJA IO, 2 20″ Cinema Display, FCP Studio 2 (6.02), OS X10.4.11
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3 Replies
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For whatever reason Apple has chosen to shy away from allowing native formats into FCP. They do so with DVCPROHD, DV and HDV but not so much with AvcIntra and MXF. But I think this has more to do with limitations of QuickTime. So I wouldn’t expect to see this rolled into FCP soon but you never know. For specific differences, I’d send an email to MXF4Mac- they are pretty open and honest about how their MXF importer differs from the others.
Noah
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Hey Noah,
the open QuickTime architecture is very powerful and as you might know our MXF solutions integrate in Mac OS X and FC Studio solutions via QuickTime. We provide icons and preview support yet on the Finder’s file management level so it really feels like it would be part of the system and part of QuickTime.
MXF itself is very complex and comprehensive. Adding the fast and direct access without converting all these different variations from various creators (even if they contain the same kind of compression formats) is the real challenge and needs lots of testing and validating. Our MXF archive contains more than 15000 test files and it’s growing every week. We also reported many issues within MXF files and helped manufactures and customers to fix or improve the file structure.
Best
Bjoern———————
Product Manager
MXF4mac
https://mxf4mac.com -
When using a Quantum drive, you should use this one which has MXF search capabilities:
https://www.quantum.com/Products/TapeDrives/DLT/SDLT600A/Index.aspx
Spotlight is also MXF aware so if you have lots of nearline storage, all it takes is hitting command-space to bring up Spotlight.
Glad you liked the tutorial and thanks for the compliments.
Calibrated is not free, by the way.
Why is MXF4mac more expensive? Well, it works and works well no matter how big your prject gets, or how much footage you have. All time code and spanned clips are carried through from beginning to end and the MXF4mac team is highly committed to MXF workflows from acquisition to output on a Mac. It’s truly quite cool. Also, the P2 Flow Contextual Menu (which is free if you have MXF4QT Import) is a very handy appliance. I can’t wait to see what MXF4mac has in store with their P2 Flow software. Should be very cool.
Jeremy
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