Need to change codec without conversion. xdcam to h264

[William Terrio]

I can’t even figure out how to get the command line open in ffmpeg, but it’s ok. I’ll live with this for now, I’m just happy to finally have it working. Thanks a bunch sir!

[Anna Chiaretta]

So I am going to jump on this thread to suss out the codec problem I am having (same issue except that I don’t want a shitty H.264)…

At my place of work we are on a MacPro that has been upgraded to Lion and runs Premiere and AVID, we are looking to edit a project in Premiere where the raw footage supplied by a collaborator is in XDCAM, sadly we can’t work with any Apple proprietary codecs because Apple doesn’t make codecs free to install like AVID (jerks).

Rather than asking the collaborator to re-transcode and mail hard drives back and forth again I was going to transcode on my home freelance system that runs both Premiere and FCP7 (so it handles xdcam and ProRes just fine). My current plan is to use DNXHD at the same bitrate as the original files but curious what others would do.

So the question is:
What codec would you recommend on a transcode output from XDCAM for working in premiere?

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