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Cannot import DNxHD mxf
I am trying to import a DNxHD compressed 1080p .mxf file into Vegas, but Vegas refuses to open it. Is it possible to do this? I have the Avid Quicktime Codecs installed, which Vegas uses.
Perhaps Vegas supports DNxHD .mov files only, but not .mxf? Any help with this would be greatly appreciated. I also have access to Prores HD .mov versions of the files, but Vegas will not open those either; it will only pull in the audio.
Thanks in advance.
Using Vegas 10.0
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5 Replies
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Try changing the file extension from .mxf to .mov.
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Tried, same result. I was hopeful that that would work, but perhaps .mxf wrapper and .mov wrapper are not as closely related as .mp4 and .mov are…
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vegas will use prores.. make sure you have a more recent version of quicktime and pull the files from your hard drive and not a removable drive
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If the prorez file plays in quicktime I would use quicktime pro to convert it to something else.
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That’s no better than changing the file extension from .mxf to .avi or anything else. Materials Exchange Format has nothing to do with Quicktime, it’s related a bit to AAF (Advanced Authoring Format).
When you load a complex file format like MXF, MOV (Quicktime), AVI, or MP4, the application you’re using (Vegas, for example) has to find a particular CODEC within the framework of that specific multimedia subsystem. If it’s not there, it just doesn’t work. Manually changing a .MOV to .MP4, or vice-versa, can work if you’re lucky, but only because the MPEG-4 container format was derived from .MOV.
My guess is that MXF lives within Vegas as a fairly fixed thing… the CODECs you get with Vegas are the ones you keep. Unlike Quicktime or VfW/DirectShow, far as I know there’s no system-wide support for MXF. Maybe you could extend Vegas’s support of MXF via a custom Vegas plug-in (same way Vegas gets MPEG-4, in fact), but I don’t believe such a thing for MXF and DNxHD exist.
Quicktime and AVI (Video for Windows or DirectShow) live outside Vegas as independent, system-wide media carriers. Thus, it’s pretty common for 3rd party plug-ins to support one or more of these; that makes them functional in any application. For example, the Cineform CODEC works as a plug-in to both Quicktime and AVI, but far as I know, the Avid DNxHD plug-in only runs under Quicktime.
Another possible means of support in the system: DirectShow. You can apparently write a DirectShow filter to support any native container class — MPEG-2, Quicktime, MXF, etc. So its possible that someone has written a DirectShow filter for MXF and DNxHD. I found the latest version of the increasingly mis-named open source ffMPEG subsystem reportedly contains support for DNxHD in an MXF wrapper, 8-bit only. You could certainly use this on a command-line to re-mux to something else, but that’s a bit more complex than just adding another CODEC to Windows.
I also read an article that suggests that Avid’s version of MXF is tweaked compared to everyone else’s. “The great thing about standards — there are so many”… kind of stuff, I guess. Anyway, you might read this: https://michaelkammes.com/avid/play-avid-mxf-for-free
-Dave
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