[Eric Kornblum]

Hiya Tim,
As others here have mentioned, MP4 spans a broad range of quality levels depending on the bit depth (8 bit vs 10 bit), chroma subsampling (4:2:2 vs 4:2:0), and data rate.

8 bit 4:2:0 is pretty common as a final delivery format, so in theory if you shot everything framed, exposed, and white balanced perfectly in-camera, and you didn’t want to have creative flexibility in terms of color correction/grading or moving/scaling the video in your edit, you could actually shoot that way. But that’s theory 🙂

In reality, I’d suggest you’re really going to want to record using a 10 bit 4:2:2 codec (or better), as any footage (regardless of codec) will quickly start degrading once you start color grading/correcting, moving/resizing, etc.

As far as data rate, what you’ll want/need will depend on how much detail there is in your scene and how much movement there is. As a reference point, Sony’s FX30 (the lowest $1800 entry point to their cinema line) will do 1080p240, 10 bit 4:2:2 at 50 mbps (using an IPB codec) or at 222 mbps (using an all I-frame codec).

And as others here have mentioned, if future-proofing is a big concern, you may want to consider shooting at 4k (or UHD) instead of 1080p (HD). But of course this can bump you up into a higher price bracket not just for the camera, but also for the memory cards, storage space, processing power, etc…

Sounds like a fun/interesting project. Best wishes for it!

[Eric Kornblum]

I’d recommend finding out what the final delivery settings are going to be (hopefully the production company can provide clarification on that…) and set your project to match those settings. If the source files are too taxing on your machine/drives for those settings, FCPX will let you create proxies for the media so you can work on a more manageable set of files.