[Jimdumm]

Thanks for your thoughts Matt.

You’re right that this is all a major effort, but it’s only intended to be a temporary measure until Final Cut supports AVC Intra. At the moment, we’re using the Firestore which is a real pain for the cameraman – having the camera tethered to that thing doesn’t give him the same freedom of movement that he’s used to. It also adds another possible point of failure in the field.

Anyway, if being able to jam twice as much onto a P2 card makes it realistic for us to move away from the Firestore, AVC Intra is probably worth the palaver.

Incidentally, concerning your suggestion that “the reason we love P2” is the shortened ingestion times: I have to say that I really do not love P2. In theory it’s great but in practice
I find that by the time we’ve transferred the P2 data from the Firestore to a firewire drive, and then made a backup, and then brought those drives back to base and transferred them to our RAID for editing, its no faster than real-time capture from tape. And that’s before you even get into how to archive the stuff…

Tapeless capture is clearly the future, but in my opinion, it’s not there quite yet.

[Jimdumm]

Thanks for the suggestion. It’s great that Raylight will support the codec in the future, but right now there doesn’t seem to be any software that can handle AVC Intra.

The current projection for support in Final Cut is apparently “around Christmas”.

Cheers,

Jim

[Jimdumm]

Hi Matt.

Thanks for sharing your findings – great to finally have it confirmed what you can/can’t do with AVC-Intra and Final Cut Pro.

You mention in another thread that you did manage to get the footage into Final Cut Pro by digitising through the SDI out on the camera, which sounds like a good work-around until FCP supports the codec natively.

Two things occur to me:

As documentary-makers, we shoot a lot of material and are often away from base for long periods. We couldn’t possibly afford enough P2 cards to avoid offloading and re-using them in the field. If we copy the P2 volumes onto portable drives so we can re-use the P2 cards, do you know if it’s possible to later transfer back from the drives to the P2 cards in order to digitise in from the camera as you describe?

Secondly, as I understand it, AVC-Intra is an H264-based format. I would guess that, if you could somehow extract the data stream from the P2 MXF files, it theoretically should open in Quicktime, from where it could be transcoded to ProRes or another codec that FCP understands. Does anyone have any idea of some software which can unpack MXF files, without unnecessarily being able to understand their contents?

Cheers,

Jim

[Jimdumm]

Great to get some solid information at last! I’ll reply in your other thread…

Cheers,

Jim

[Jimdumm]

Unfortunately, I’m not sure it is as simple as that at present. I checked the preferences in the Log and Transfer window, as you suggested. It offers transcoding to ProRes for AVCHD, but there’s no mention of AVC-Intra. This is on FCP 6.0.1.

AVCHD and AVC-Intra are two completely different things. Why they have to be called by almost identical names is beyond me…

Cheers,

Jim

[Jimdumm]

Thanks very much for your reply, Matt. If you do get round to giving it a go, please do let us know how it works out.

Otherwise, if you’re so inclined, if you could shoot a short test (even 5 seconds) and could mail me over the resulting P2 files, I could try and bash out a workflow to get this up and running…

Cheers,

Jim