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Nx5 & FCP
Hey guys,
I am thinking about getting four Nx5’s for our company. We are currently on Ex1’s but the way our Pd’s and freelancers treat them there have been two destroyed in the past few months and they are expensive cameras to replace.
The Nx5’s are very appealing as they are a few thousand pound cheaper and they seem very similar to the Ex range except the lens and, of course, the compressions. AVCHD obviously needs to go ProRes for FCP but I am wary of ProRes as we have had problems in the past using it off Xsan 1.4. We have upgraded to Xsan 2.21 but I just wanted feedback if anyone is using these cameras or indeed converting AVCHD to ProRes for FCP. The Xdcam is working so well right now I dont wanna change it but the bosses are obviously looking at the cheaper Nx5’s with all the ‘accidents’ that happen with our kit.
Also, any news on FCP supporting AVCHD natively? Plus, has anyone used CLIPWRAP?
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4 Replies
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I am working on a short TV pilot using these cameras. I am converting everything to ProRes because, well, you have to. AVCHD is NOT supported natively in FCP. Sure, Adobe can edit it, but it gets sluggish as hell after a while. Some formats are not supported natively, they need to be converted. AVCHD is one of those formats.
I have had a big issues with AVCHD from that particular camera: https://lfhd.net/2010/04/05/avchd-the-pilot-job/
First off, the timecode that the camera records is not transferred to FCP. The camera is nice in that you can set a custom timecode, but then that doesn’t come into FCP. Nor Avid. Log and Transfer starts every clip at 00:00:00:00. This ONLY happens with this camera. From the Panasonic HMC-150…no issues. Timecode from the camera comes in just fine.
Second, when I hit clips that were longer than 20 min, importing suddenly took a LONG time. Importing normally is faster than realtime for me, because I have a fast tower. 5 min clips take 3.5 min, and so on. But clips over 20 min…took HOURS. Somehow Sony’s implimentation of the AVCHD format is different than Panasonic’s and Canon’s. So that blows!
Clipwrap is your best bet. When I started this project, ClipWrap couldn’t deal with this format. But now it has been fixed and works well. Timecode still resets to 00:00:00:00, but it comes in faster than realtime.
The image the camera gives is fine. It’s the workflow in post that sucks. It would suck the same for Avid too…not sure about Adobe…but I’m guessing the same. That TC issue is a pain.
Shane
GETTING ORGANIZED WITH FINAL CUT PRO DVD…don’t miss it.
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def -
Thanks Shane,
Sounds a bit of a pain to be honest and with four of them working constantly serving 6 editors and making 100’s of hours of programming a year i might pull my hair out! The tc issue and the clips over 20 minutes are particularly worrying…
We are now looking at the jvc gy-hm700e which shoots xdcam in mov files right onto the sd cards / hard drives, very appealing.
Just out of curiosity, what does clipwrap do exactly?
Thanks for the feedback.
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[Charlie Key] “Just out of curiosity, what does clipwrap do exactly? “
Converts the AVCHD footage to a variety of codecs, including ProRes, DVCPRO HD…and DNxHD if you use Avid. And it is now pretty fast. VERY uber useful software. It converts other footage too, but I use it for AVCHD. And footage from the stupid NXCam…
Shane
GETTING ORGANIZED WITH FINAL CUT PRO DVD…don’t miss it.
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def -
“Sure, Adobe can edit it, but it gets sluggish as hell after a while.”
Well, not really. I would encourage interested people to try it on CS5. With 64-bit native on the Mac and using all of your CPU cores (at around 70% or better), the AVCHD editing experience is not really an issue anymore. This week at an event, I played 3 streams of AVCHD with effects + an XDCAM EX clip on a laptop (PC) at full res with no problems.
I think the only real remaining issue is one of scrubbing – that can still be problematic to some, but understandable once you grasp what a temporal codec is and what a computer has to do to decode while scrubbing.
Hope this helps,
Dennis
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