size of .mxf files

[Shane Ross]

[Byron Caplan] “was shooting at 1080 x 1920 @ 30fps 60i (btw- didn’t that used to be called 30i?)”

Yup. But then some engineers thought that it’d be a good idea to list the FIELDS per second when dealing with interlaced formats. No one understands why they did this, and it only leads to confusion.

[Byron Caplan] “the cf card had 86.83 gigs worth of video on them, but when i imported it into FCP it ballooned up to 243.31 gigs. WOW! that’s 3x the original size. is this normal?”

Yup. The camera shoots XDCAM, and that has a much lower data rate than ProRes 422. I wonder if you can use the Canon XF Transfer utility to re-wrap these as QT…then you’ll have QT XDCAM, much lighter than ProRes.

[Byron Caplan] “are canon’s .MXF HD 50Mbps files compressed?”

They are…that’s why they are smaller. You are converting them to a less compressed format…one that has larger file sizes.

If you want to edit this natively, without converting, then you’ll need to use Avid media Composer or Adobe Premiere Pro.

Shane
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[Byron Caplan]

thanks for the swift concise answers. the biggest problem i foresee with this reality is that my hard drives will fill up much faster than i originally thought. maybe i want to consider avid or premiere now.

-byron

[Rafael Amador]

[Shane Ross] “Yup. The camera shoots XDCAM, and that has a much lower data rate than ProRes 422. I wonder if you can use the Canon XF Transfer utility to re-wrap these as QT…then you’ll have QT XDCAM, much lighter than ProRes.”
That should be the way to go.
Fast and keep the original files/size.
rafael

[Byron Caplan]

okay… so i went back into the log and transfer window and found the little “cog”-icon pulldown at the top, which is where i found “preferences,” and in there i found the canon xf transfer MPEG-2 plug-in. over to the right, it was set for “ProRes” which i guess is the default setting on FCP…. i clicked it and found two other choices. One choice was “native.” i re-set it to “native,” and that did the trick! i re-digitized the clips and their file sizes went way down… back down to where they were on the CF card… at approx. 6.1MBps (50Mbps) instead of 17.5MBps.

btw- the transfer happens a lot faster with this setting.

Thanks a ton. i never would have figured that out on my own!!!

-byron

[Rafael Amador]

[Byron Caplan] “btw- the transfer happens a lot faster with this setting.”
Right.
There is not any kind of transcoding/processing. The original video/audio info is re-packed in a new QT “container” instead of the MXF.
rafael