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Working natively with XDCAM footage in FCPX
Over the course of several days, our production company will be offsite shooting about 20 hours worth of corporate presentations with two EX3 cameras. Basically, 40 hours worth of material – I will be on location getting a jump start on an edit of the presentations. The edits themselves are rather straightforward, I will not be cutting the material down much, simply doing a multicam edit of the two cameras, and overlaying PPT slides when necessary.
My priorities are to work quickly, ideally work natively, and reduce storage requirements.
FCP7, you’d have to transcode all that XDCAM footage, that would take forever and boost storage requirements.
Premiere Pro CS6 works natively with XDCAM and might fit the bill, but I was hoping to give FCPX a longer look at last, and see how it does in a multi-cam edit of a live presentation like this.
With this in mind, I’m looking for some help from those with more FCPX experience.
I’ve found already that while FCPX works “natively” with the EX3 footage with the Sony plug-in, it is duplicating the material to FCPX’s “event” folder. The copy seems to be rather painless and quick, so my need for speed is not compromised. However, I am duplicating the source material, which is hurting my storage requirements.
Questions:
– Is there any way around FCPX copying/duplicating the XDCAM source material?– I’m guessing no since it needs to rewrap this footage for FCPX. Which leads to the next question – do I need to retain my EX3 sources for any reason other than best practice? I’d never dispose of camera sources, so I would simply archive and shelve them, but I would not keep them on the drive I was editing on. Does anyone see anything wrong with this practice? It does not appear that FCPX relies on these camera sources once it imports the EX3 footage.
– For those with experience with both, any opinions on FCPX v. PProCS6 for a project like this?
Any advice/opinions is greatly appreciated…many thanks –
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8 Replies
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FCP 7 works natively with XDCam footage. No transcoding required. Just gets rewrapped as QT files by either the Sony app or log and transfer. Very quick. From there you can work in a native XDCam sequence with the option to render as pro res. XDCam and HDV are the only 2 codecs that get this priveledge. And if you turn off FULL rendering, you won’t have to conform every render.
I don’t think I’ve used XDCam in X yet. Just ProRes and h264.
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I work with XDCAM HD and uses Sonys Xdcam transfer to “transfer” my clips to a folder on my external Disc I use for all editing. Importing it to FCPX 10.0.6 and choose not to copy files is what I do. Working with no trouble. Now (10.0.6)you can even choose to export your final work in XDCAM format if you want.
Mac Pro 2×2.66 Quad Core Intel Xeon 12Gb/1066 DDR3 Caldigit VR external Raid 1 Speed about 80Mb/sec FCPX latest
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Thanks Jan & Brett for the replies.
Brett, re: FCP7 – I’ve used XDCam Transfer in the past with FCP7, but had not used the Log & Transfer plugin for it, and that seems like a good way to go.
Jan re: FCPX – this also seems like a good way to go. How quickly does it handle a card worth of material? XDCam Transfer with FCP7 could be a little slow, but I’m imagining it’s gotten a lot faster.
In both cases, do you then treat your rewrapped XDCAM sources as your original sources going forward? I’m thinking about storage and archiving requirements.
Thanks again for the input.
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The only thing that take time is xdcam transfer to copy and make .mov files and a full XDCAM HD Blu Ray 25Gb as i use I think will take about 20 minutes. If you copy from a card it must read much faster. But thats all. FCPX now uses the files as they are. And the Yes that is my original source and only source. My security is a Raid 1 Cal Digit 4TB disc giving full protection but then half the storecapacity of = 2TB.
When finished I store on Western digital discs also Raid 1 full protection at least for important films.Mac Pro 2×2.66 Quad Core Intel Xeon 12Gb/1066 DDR3 Caldigit VR external Raid 1 Speed about 80Mb/sec FCPX latest
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Got it – thanks Jan, that’s very helpful.
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As other ones said, I work with XDCAM material in the same way in FCP X as I did in FCP 7: going trough XDCAM Transfer which doesn’t transcode and only rewraps.
We had been doing this in FCP 7 for 3 years now at our company.There is a ‘gotcha’ though…
In FCP 7, which was based on the Quicktime Framework, you had access to Smart Rendering.
If you were in an XDCAM timeline, only cutting simple XDCAM material, without effects or so, FCP 7 just copied the original media when exporting. You can do a very fast export when you just use ‘Use Current Settings’.The problem is, if you try the same with FCP X, in Current Settings it exports to Prores. So it converts everything on export. It does this pretty quickly, even on lowly hardware, but not as fast as the export in FCP 7.
Yes, you can now export to XDCAM codec in 10.0.6 (you could do that before too), but it still re-compresses. Then it takes even longer than when you export to Prores in my speed tests.
Test it. You’ll see. I’ve also noticed performance of those Quicktime wrapped XDCAM material to be slightly worse in FCP X then in FCP 7 on the same hardware (written about that here: https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/344/13326) but I didn’t retest this in 10.0.6I’ve written about the lack of smart rendering in FCP X in this thread:
https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/335/35862If you work with Prores, FCP X gets the same speed as FCP 7 or faster.
We work like you, on congresses, with very quick delivery, and because the lack of smart rendering we won’t be able to use FCP X. We can use it for other assignments though, although some things also depend on having a more detailed timecode-HUD and timecode reader/generators (that work on source clips). But that’s off topic.
Another thing:
since 10.0.6, Apple announced support for native MXF media, which lots of XDCAM cameras record to. You do need a 3rd Party plugin, that costs money.
If someone has one of those, could they tell me if FCP X exports more quickly with XDCAM material? As fast as the speed that FCP 7 did? (which was pretty much the same speed as copying the media in the Finder) -
Very interesting post, thanks. Great point about the exporting and FCPX re-compressing, that’s good to know.
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I work in 7 with XDCam all the time and it’s slow as beans for exporting because if you’re working native XDCam, it has to conform the footage (i frames and all that) on export. If you conform (render>full) as you go along it is pretty zippy to export, but takes forever to render just about anything while you work.
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