FCPX and C300 files

[Oliver Peters]

Despite my exasperation, this was good faith effort. The location audio was very noisy in places, so in order to get a head start – the cam op did some noise reduction/repair overnight while on location. The mistake was that he erroneously thought he had inserted the cleaned up audio (only) back into the files and wasn’t overwriting the video.

Just another day in post ☺

– Oliver

Oliver Peters – oliverpeters.com

[Oliver Peters]

According to the support doc, DNx is not supported (yet):

https://support.apple.com/guide/final-cut-pro/supported-media-formats-ver2833f855/mac

I do have the Avid codec packs installed, so it’s not that. The odd part is that neither QT nor FCPX flags it as an unsupported codec or tries to convert it. These files are simply opened as audio.

– Oliver

Oliver Peters – oliverpeters.com

[Jeremy Garchow]

The codecs aren’t released yet by Apple. Whether that’s Mojave or Catalina.

They, as I understand it; will be released by Apple just like XAVC and others are today in the Pro Video Formats update.

Avid Media Composer isn’t totally sanctioned for Catalina quite yet and is now in Public Beta and “Coming Soon”.

All formats are not supported on Catalina: https://avid.force.com/pkb/articles/en_US/compatibility/Media-Composer-File-Type-Support-on-macOS-Catalina

But these same third party coded rules apply to fcpx as well, even on Mojave.

[Oliver Peters]

[Jeremy Garchow] “Avid Media Composer isn’t totally sanctioned for Catalina quite yet and is now in Public Beta and “Coming Soon”.”

Just to be clear, that’s currently in testing. When MC2020 is released there will be some missing components, which will be replaced by equivalents in subsequent versions. Avid has the additional challenge of trying to be forwards and backwards compatible – something other companies simply choose not to deal with. In any case, it makes a change to Catalina especially tough.

But that is all unrelated to this issue.

– Oliver

Oliver Peters – oliverpeters.com

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Oliver Peters] “But that is all unrelated to this issue.”

Well, kinda. Third party codec support is what we are talking about.

This isn’t happening in FCPX. But “soon” Avid codecs will be a part of the codecs that Apple officially makes available to the OS.

I imagine this will be true on Mojave as it will be in Catalina.

[Oliver Peters]

[Jeremy Garchow] “This isn’t happening in FCPX. But “soon” Avid codecs will be a part of the codecs that Apple officially makes available to the OS.”

Well, the codecs aren’t the issue. It’s actually the library dependencies that the player framework requires in order to play third-party codecs. I’m not sure whether that’s being developed by Avid (or any other developer) or the QuickTime team itself. Apple has always had the codecs and I don’t think the codecs themselves changed with the move to 64-bit. Only the library components.

Although I’m on Mojave, I no longer have any native 32-bit apps on this system. Of course, there are probably still 32-bit library components for the OS. I can open these files in any other non-Apple application. For example, Switch or VLC did not create their own library components to open files.

But the reason I said it was unrelated was not so much that FCPX can’t open these files (although I wish it did) – it’s that it incorrectly identified these files as audio-only, without any sort of error warning for an “unsupported format” or something like that. Same with QT.

– Oliver

Oliver Peters – oliverpeters.com