Does MXF support in FCPX mean Quicktime update?

[Jeremy Garchow]

It will most likely be an AVFoundation update, but I’d hope QT could play them back.

In the mean tine, there’s a free MXF player called MXF4mac Player. It will even playback p2 files with audio, and you don’t need a stand alone QT Component to do so.

https://hamburgpromedia.com/products/mxf4mac/applications/mxf-for-mac-player.php

To open p2 files right click on an XML file in the “clips” finder and away you go.

It’s very handy, you can even turn audio channels on and off for playback.

Also works with any other media that QT can playback. I use it a lot.

Jeremy

[Oliver Peters]

QuickTime is dead as a media architecture for Apple. I doubt you’ll see much future development for QuickTime beyond it being a basic consumer, player application. Or maybe some continued use as a container format for other native camera codecs.

– Oliver

Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Oliver Peters] “QuickTime is dead as a media architecture for Apple. “

But it doesn’t mean that the player couldn’t be used a front end for AV Foundation to playback media files, for instance.

[Jim Giberti]

It will be nice to get MXF support for the new C300.

Anxious to see the new update.

[Mathieu Ghekiere]

Good question;

As Jeremy said, FCP X is built on AV foundation instead of Quicktime framework.

What I am wondering though is this:

In FCP 7, if you wanted to use XDCAM format (MXF), you had to go trough Sony’s Transfer tool, which would rewrap (not re-encode) in a .mov, in a Quicktime container for use.
I never had problems with it, and performance in FCP 7 generally was very good. Okay, when I had to render out 5-hour long timelines with 6 layers of XDCAM materiaal and timecode filter on it, we could get errors (we still do), but never any other problems.

With FCP X I don’t get as good a performance with the same Quicktime-wrapped XDCAM material. Even with just one layer. I tried to do a 3D edit, and I got really really significantly worse performance in FCP X then in FCP 7. And that was again, just messing with one clip, and using the same 3D plugin in FCP 7 as in FCP X on the same hardware.
If I do multicam, I can play back 4 angles of XDCAM Quicktimes effortlesly in FCP 7, but I kept getting (serious) dropped frames in FCP X until I let the software make Proxy Prores.
I did a short film for a company recently on FCP X, and it was all shot on XDCAM. In the beginning I had a wonderful time tagging all the clips, how the magnetic timeline works (except for a couple of instances) and how easy it was to make speed changes in it.
But after a while I really got the worst performance ever. And I only worked on it for 2 days, but after a while the software would just respond only after 30 seconds of pressing a button. And this was one short timeline, no color correction at that point, no special graphics or titles, …
I had to transcode to Proxy Prores (again… and with a short deadline, costing me a lot of precious hours) to use it again (still was pretty slow, but much better at this point). And this was on a i7 iMac from 2 years ago, with 8GB of RAM. The same hardware did not have any problems doing the same (and much more complicated) edits in FCP 7.

So I sent a lot of feedback to Apple about this, and I *really* hope that MXF native support ALSO means that general performance with XDCAM (Quicktime wrapped or not) will be much better in FCP X then it has been.

[Paul Neumann]

I too have found MXF with FCPX to be a nightmare. We shoot MXF, edit and finish with PPro and AE (CS6) with no problems. I take EVERY job I do (seriously, every damn one of them) into FCPX when I’m done and try to redo them there. This is to keep me up to speed on FCPX and hopefully learn a new trick or two. I’ve made it through maybe 5 of them over the past year. Things just get mucked up, slowed down, and frustratingly unhappy.

i wish the best to all of you who have managed to make money off this NLE. I really do. I’ll keep trying to get it act like I know a good editor can, but it just seems like it’s all work arounds and third party expenses to just be functional.

[Mathieu Ghekiere]

Well Paul,

I do have to admit, the moments that it works great and you use its strengths (tagging all those hundreds of clips was a dream after how it’s done in FCP 7, quickly changing an order of something in the magnetic timeline and doing lots of speedchanges), it really feels clunky going back to any other NLE.
But no doubt about it, Apple still has lots of work to do, and like you, when I got serious performance issues in FCP X with XDCAM, I also sometimes doubted: was it a good choice to begin this project in FCPX?

The 10.0.6 update is already at least 120 days since the last one, which is the longest period ever. On top of that, the last really feature-filled update was since the end of january.
This actually makes me pretty hopeful that the next update for FCP X will be pretty big. Let’s hope I’m right.