Xdvb codec not support on Windows at all?

[Angelo Lorenzo]

Xdvb is just the 4FourCC code for XDCAM footage wrapped in an MOV container. XDCAM is, usually, MPEG2 video and Quicktime doesn’t come with that codec out of the box; It’s an additional purchase on Windows if I recall correctly.

Just get something like MPEG Streamclip to rewrap the file into the MP4 container and you should be all set. Stupid but true. https://www.squared5.com/

Rewrapping is just changing the container, so the process should be quick. You don’t have to recompress the footage in any way.

——————–
Angelo Lorenzo

Need to encode ProRes on your Windows PC?
Introducing ProRes Helper, an awesome little app that makes it possible
Fallen Empire Digital Production Services – Los Angeles
RED transcoding, on-set DIT, and RED Epic rental services
Fallen Empire – The Blog
A blog dedicated to filmmaking, the RED workflow, and DIT tips and tricks
Can your post production question fit in a tweet? Follow me on Twitter

Tweets by FallenEmpireDPS

[William Terrio]

Thank you for the suggestion and info. I’ve actually never heard of rewrapping before. I looked through all of Streamclip’s options, and I didn’t see anything about Rewrapping footage.
Another thing is, when my project is done, I need to be able to load all the same mov clips back into the timeline when I load it up on a mac. I don’t have a mac at home, but I have adobe premiere, and I was hoping to just open up the project and work on it at home, but this stupid codec is causing a world of trouble.

[William Terrio]

hmm, I replied but I don’t see it appearing, so I’ll retype it.
Thank you for your response and info. I haven’t heard of rewrapping before. the Streamclip program doesn’t seem to have any rewrap function though. And only the audio loads when I load the clip.
Another thing is, I need this footage to be able to load again when I open the timeline on a mac. I don’t have a mac at home, but I do have adobe premiere, so I was hoping to work on this project at home and bring it in to work when it’s done, but this codec is making that impossible.

[Angelo Lorenzo]

Grab ffmpeg and use it in the commandline, something to the effect of

ffmpeg.exe -i input.mov -vcodec copy -acodec copy output.mp4

This tells FFMPEG to copy the video and audio into a new wrapper. Premiere Pro on Mac should read these files just fine. XDCAM, in half of the cameras, comes out natively as an MP4 file, it’s Final Cut that is forcing the weirdness in this setup.

As it stands now, Quicktime on Windows doesn’t have the video codec so that’s why you’re only hearing audio in Premiere.

——————–
Angelo Lorenzo

Need to encode ProRes on your Windows PC?
Introducing ProRes Helper, an awesome little app that makes it possible
Fallen Empire Digital Production Services – Los Angeles
RED transcoding, on-set DIT, and RED Epic rental services
Fallen Empire – The Blog
A blog dedicated to filmmaking, the RED workflow, and DIT tips and tricks
Can your post production question fit in a tweet? Follow me on Twitter

[William Terrio]

Alrighty. I got FFmpeg before because that was the only other thing I read that could help solve this issue, but I couldn’t figure out how to get it to work for the life of me. I have very limited knowledge of command line stuff. I did manage this time to run what you said to do using some dragging and dropping, but it didn’t work. Here’s what it spat out.

[William Terrio]

Alright, might be in a different situation now. Apparently Premiere can run the raw MP4 clips right from the sony BPAV files. We ususally use XDCam Transfer to change them into the .movs.
My co-worker is saying that we shouldn’t edit with these MP4s because they aren’t as efficient and as high quality as the mov versions. Also, when dropped into the timeline, it says Conforming [clip name] in the corner to all the MP4s. He’s saying that’s eating up a ton of data, but according to a different discussion on here, it’s apparently just doing the audio, which I would think is very minimal.
So, in short, what I need to know is, should we stop converting all these raw MP4s to MOV(because they are the same size, taking up double the hard drive space), or would we be sacrificing quality by using the MP4s.

[Angelo Lorenzo]

f you have the camera originals, there is no need to use FFMPEG. The reason I suggested it was to revert the MOV files you have to something close as to what they should come originally.

In regards to “MOV being easier to edit” in this situation it’s a no. Both approaches are still using the original MPEG2 compression. It doesn’t sound like there was any conversion to something like ProRes. Even still, on modern computers the computing power needed between MPEG2 and ProRes probably won’t make the case for having an extra copy of footage in ProRes.

Yes, you will have to live with conforming audio. This is how Premiere mixes audio efficiently.

——————–
Angelo Lorenzo

Need to encode ProRes on your Windows PC?
Introducing ProRes Helper, an awesome little app that makes it possible
Fallen Empire Digital Production Services – Los Angeles
RED transcoding, on-set DIT, and RED Epic rental services
Fallen Empire – The Blog
A blog dedicated to filmmaking, the RED workflow, and DIT tips and tricks
Can your post production question fit in a tweet? Follow me on Twitter

[William Terrio]

Im fine with conforming audio, since that probably takes up hardly any space on the hard drive.
I found a forum post online where someone said XDcam Transfer only “rewraps” the footage to a different “container” without effecting the quality. I’ve been trying to find an exact definition of Rewrapping, but couldn’t find one, but it seems to mean that it just changes the format and codec, but doesn’t effect the quality. My coworker seems to think that changing the format to MOV with xdcam transfer actually increases the quality of the raw footage somehow, because it’s using extra files that are placed with the mp4. But I doubt that.
He also said that “nobody edits using MP4s” because they can cause trouble with editing due to being inefficient or something. Can you confirm that editing with MP4s and MOVs transcoded from those MP4s is basically the same thing? I know some editors can start to glitch and crash when they have too many videos from a type of format, and I don’t want to run into that here.

[Angelo Lorenzo]

Lets take a step back, because you’re getting information from a bunch of places and it sounds like you don’t have a basic foundation of what’s going on.

Read this, I wrote it and I think it’ll help you understand a lot https://www.fallenempiredigital.com/blog/2013/02/08/a-guide-to-common-video-formats-containers-compression-and-codecs/

First, you have Sony XDCAM footage. So what the heck is XDCAM? Is it a container, is it a video format, orrrrr? XDCAM is just branding for Sony’s cameras. The footage you are dealing with is the MPEG4 Container, MPEG2 video, and uncompressed audio. This combination of settings is part of the XDCAM “system”.

When you bring it over to Mac and use it in Final Cut, Final Cut is taking the audio and video out of the MPEG4 container and sticking it in a MOV (Quicktime container). It’s like slicing the hard cover off a book and gluing on a soft cover: the contents are exactly the same. Final Cut does this because it’s built on Quicktime and only likes Quicktime based media. It’s not that it’s adding any special sauce, it’s just making the footage easier to work with a program that is old.

Now we have MPEG2 video and uncompressed audio in an MOV container. The codec (what reads and writes) for MPEG2 isn’t, by default, installed with Quicktime Pro so you need https://www.calibratedsoftware.com/QXD.asp if you decided to keep using the MOV files.

MPEG2 as a camera format is usually intraframe, meaning that each frame stands alone and doesn’t need information from surrounding frames to be read. This makes it suitable for editing even on machines a few good years old.

If you’re using Premiere Pro on both Mac and PC with no expectations to go back to Final Cut for anything, just edit the camera originals. My original advice about rewrapping the footage from MOV back to MPEG4 was based on the fact that camera originals may not have been available to you.

——————–
Angelo Lorenzo

Need to encode ProRes on your Windows PC?
Introducing ProRes Helper, an awesome little app that makes it possible
Fallen Empire Digital Production Services – Los Angeles
RED transcoding, on-set DIT, and RED Epic rental services
Fallen Empire – The Blog
A blog dedicated to filmmaking, the RED workflow, and DIT tips and tricks
Can your post production question fit in a tweet? Follow me on Twitter

Tweets by FallenEmpireDPS

[Tim Kolb]

[William Terrio] “My co-worker is saying that we shouldn’t edit with these MP4s because they aren’t as efficient and as high quality as the mov versions. Also, when dropped into the timeline, it says Conforming [clip name] in the corner to all the MP4s. He’s saying that’s eating up a ton of data, but according to a different discussion on here, it’s apparently just doing the audio, which I would think is very minimal.”

Exporting the clips as .movs just rewraps the file…so no quality change, no real difference if you aren’t transcoding to ProRes or something like that. And even then, you’re creating a 10 bit file with an 8 bit image inside…and Premiere Pro will decode either format into 4:4:4 32 bit float on the fly anyway.

…and as confusing as this sounds…XDcamHDEX files may have an “mp4” extension, but all XDcam derivatives are MPEG2 payload, so they aren’t tough to cut at all.

…conforming varies on different formats and in different circumstances, but typically conforming is making a separate audio file that is not embedded in the MPEG2 file for easier handling, yes.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor