[Byron Caplan]

dear dave,

thank you for your swift and sensible suggestion. please correct me if i’m wrong, but it sounds like you are saying that if i want to retain the original quality of the video, i have to bump it up to ProRes 422 at 3X the file size.

forgive my questioning and hopefully someone can explain… but i just can’t wrap my head around why a video can’t export at the same quality as it was imported in (from 4:2:2 down to 1:1:1 is a huge loss)… unless that is just the way that FCP handles the .mxf format. the degradation of colorspace is unacceptable, but the incredible jump in file size when converting to ProRes 422 is problematic for reasons of storage space.

new question: would this happen on premiere pro or avid (which i hear accepts .mxf format)?

thanx again,
-byron

[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

[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