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Premiere Pro 6 and Canon C300 workflow?
Hi there,
I am demo’ing a Canon C300 and am baffled at how difficult the workflow seems. To date I’ve been using a sony EX1 and recording everything to a Pix240i external recorder as ProRes. The workflow was quite simple!
WIth the C300, I’ve got the part where you use the Canon XF utility to “backup” the media (feels like a strange step), I can then import my clips (1080p29.97) and do an edit with the “Canon XF 1080p” sequence preset. My goal to export is to export a “Same as source” export. Ideally, this would happen quite quickly without any additional compression from premiere, and I’d have a large intermediate file which I would send to my transcoder.
My issue is that when I say export and check the “match sequence settings” box, the basic video settings show a unchangeable quality of “50”, which I take to mean 50%.
Questions:
– I am curious if anyone knows if I will indeed lose quality by exporting and matching sequence settings with a Canon XF 1080p sequence?
– Should I export from premiere to prores (and if so will that take a lot longer to transcode?) instead of mpeg2?
– Is there a better way to ingest footage from the C300 into premiere?I would love to spit out the C300 signal to my pix240 and record but it spits out 8 bit 1080 PSF!! When I put the camera into 23.98 mode, it spits out 1080psf30 still and some strange frame blending occurs… There must be a better way to work with this camera. I’d welcome any suggestions! I am in education and we generate a lot of content with quick turnaround times. Many thanks for your advice!
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6 Replies
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Canon’s XF format is not smart rendered, so “matching sequence settings” will conform the output to preview render quality mpeg (MPEG2 if I recall correctly) compression. Smart rendering currently only works for uncompressed video, P2/DVCPro, and ProRes with additional support coming for Avid DNxHD with the new version of Premiere in about 2 weeks.
Ideally, you’re looking at a ProRes or DNxHD(MOV container) export to retain quality. The one downside to Premiere and working with most native formats is that you pay the “render tax” during export rather than in the timeline.
In terms of importing to Premiere, the usual is to copy the full card to your drive and then to import within Premiere from the Media Browser panel. I’ve only performed DIT for one Canon 300 shoot, but I recall being just fine without the Canon utility.
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OK, Thanks Angelo! Glad I’m not missing anything obvious.
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Hello
with CS6, I use Prelude to get my files from the C300 and then I send the files to Premier Pro. It works great.Greetings,
Philippe -
Thanks Philippe! I was playing with prelude as well. Do you get the issue with true 24p (not 23.98) that the audio drifts out of sync? I found that this happened when trying to import from camera card directly to premiere. When I used the Canon XF utility, the drift was fixed. Curious if if you know if prelude experiences the same sync-loss.
Thanks!
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Hey Dan curious if you figured out a solution to the audio drift in 24p as I’m currently wrestling with this problem myself. The canon utility & VLC player are able to playback 24p MXL’s without drift, but Premiere is a problem, and Media Composer and FCP won’t even recognize the footage. I’m trying everything!
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Hi Benjamin,
I solved the problem by first importing through the Canon XF utility, but no way to go directly to premiere! Haven’t checked out Premiere CC yet, perhaps it has an improvement…
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