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MPEG IMX & Final Cut Pro
Does anyone out there know if you use the SDI outputs on an Sony MPEG IMX deck (NOT the special SDTI-CP ports) and capture using the IMX 50Mbp/s codec in Final Cut Pro- if the system is RECOMPRESSING the footage?
I feel like it would be…which is bad.
Also- has anyone had any experience using the whole MXF over Ethernet trick with that Flip4Mac plugin? It seems to be a pretty cool solution…
I have a project coming up that will be shot on MPEG IMX, and I need to figure out the best way to load it without going 1:1 – there will 200+ hours of footage…
j.
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4 Replies
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Yes…. I’ve done both. But I prefer to use the Flip4Mac plugin. Both work great! But I do have a word of warning. The footage absolute has to be IMX 50 Mb/s, not 40 or 30 Mb/s. FCP will only work with IMX 50 Mb/s without problems.
Do keep in mind that anytime you capture footage using SDI or any other output, that you are essentially recompressing your footage because the machine has to decode it to play it. The Flip4Mac option is completely untouched. All it does is convert the MXF files to Quicktime. There is no recompression of the footage. But another word of warning…. IMX footage files are large in size. I just imported a project of four disks that occupies about 65 gig of drive space – which is about 4 hours of footage. 200 hours of footage may take a couple of terabytes to ingest. Also, I do want you to knwo that the Flip4Mac plugin assumes that you have all eight channels of audio. So each and every clip will have eight channels of audio and there’s no way to select the number of channels you want.
Are you using this for broadcast? If you are having a drive space issue, you might want to consider digitizing using DVCPRO50 codec. Personally, I don’t see any difference in my footage by doing this. It just takes more time to ingest. This is just a suggestion since we have been using the IMX on;ly for a coupple of months. We are using Sony’s XDCAM series and its awesome! I love it. No Tape! And the ethernet connection is great except that you really need a gigabit network to do this with (file access speed?).
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Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions -
Sorry… I forgot. Let me know how your project turns out. I’m curious how it will work in a harsh condition.
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Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions -
Thanks for the info- so- with the XDCAM stuff- you’re able to capture “faster than realtime”, correct?
And does it make a copy on a local drive? Or are you constantly reading off of the XDCAM “master”?
We’ll be using the MPEG IMX tape format…but using the ethernet connection is the way to go.
I thought about using the DVCPRO codec to capture off of the IMX tapes- I feel like the recompression will be minimal…
How much bigger are 50Mbp/s IMX files versus the DVCPRO50 files? Aren’t they the same datarate (of course the audio makes a bit of a difference…)
PS – couldn’t find your email…if you want to continue this discussion offline, my email is vfxjokir at gmail dot com.
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only the pdw1500 is gigaspeed ethernet and can transfer faster than realtime.
there is also a error in the apple sequence presets for imx : apple proposes even field, but as it is 4.2.2 it should be odd.
if you are only doing DV on the xdcam, also check out mxfconvertor
https://www.mxfconverter.com/
it can download already thumbnails to select the shots you need. it doenst need even finalcutpro to run. Also they are working on a version that can read the proxy files of the xdcam disks. So you can capture very fast the offline files of a disk, do the editing and then recapture over sdi.
But no IMX support for the moment in mxfconvertor.
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