[Marcus Van bavel]

[David Jahns] “I’m curious about this, and why this is an advantage.

i’ve done a couple of P2 media jobs – but none where I was editing directly off the card. Is that common? Is it an advantage because it’s just that much quicker?

It’s not common with FCP because up until now it was flat out impossible. Yes it is quicker, you get faster playback/more streams in real time (or at higher resolution) and no waiting.

For 99% of jobs, I would imagine that even in MXF editing, you’d still have to copy footage from the P2, or the P2 store, or the Fire-Store to a media drive, right?

Yes, BUT you can do it later after the editing session is done or you when you are taking a break.

If so, what’s the advantage in staying in the MXF format?

The quicktime format does not tolerate errors.

For that matter – is there an advantage to backing up/archiving the raw MXF files in FAT32 format, as opposed to the converted quicktimes? If you’re going to restore the media for FCP, won’t you just be converting them to quicktimes again? (unless editing MXF natively, of course…)”

Correct, the backups will remain MXF files and can be stored on PC or Mac format drives. If you get a bad sector and have to repair the drive the raylight Link will allow you to cut around the bad frames, whereas the quicktime format will probably just wipe out the entire shot.

But the main advantage is the backup process is taken out of the critical time workflow. It can be done at night for example when your crew is sleeping.

[Marcus Van bavel]

You might try Raylight for Mac https://dvfilm.com/raylight/mac to recover the video and here is why.

1) Raylight only looks at the headers of the MXF files and creates links to the data straight into Final Cut Pro, so it is the least judgemental about bad data. It does not even look at the data.

2) You won’t have to copy the entire files off the card, you can render a fully or partially recovered clip by selecting the parts you need in the sequence and exporting a quicktime from that, essentially skipping over the bad data (if there is any).

There is a free demo at the link above, give it a try.

[Marcus Van bavel]

[Joe Murray] “I’ve used Raylight in Premiere with MXF files, and I always have to render the files in Premiere before they’ll play realtime. This may be a limitation of my system; I don’t know for sure because I don’t use Premiere very often. Seems to take about the same amount of time to render a file in Premiere that it takes to import the file into FCP, so not a great timesaver for me. Does anyone have different experience with Raylight, i.e. native support and realtime playback in Premiere?”

Here is a table of expected performance with Raylight 3.0:
https://dvfilm.com/raylight/raylightSpeed.htm

For example 720/24P in Draft/Green you should be able to get
real time with dissolves, etc without rendering, no problem.

If you get much different results contact DVFilm Support.

[Marcus Van bavel]

What might be confusing is that there are two separate products:

The Raylight system allows you to bring MXF files directly into Premiere (or Vegas) and edit native DVCPROHD. Premiere+Raylight is all you need to edit with the HVX200.

The other product is Raylight Decoder, which is a set of decoder plugins for CineForm and Quicktime. It replaces the Panasonic decoder in CineForm HDLink and improves its image quality. The link for the decoder is here: https://dvfilm.com.raylight/decoder

[Marcus Van bavel]

I’m the author of Raylight.

Interestingly, you can bump back and forth between the Raylight decoder and the Panasonic decoder by switching back and forth between Raylight Blue and Raylight Green (Raylight Green in the new release of Raylight uses the Panasonic decoder to do fast previews). The extra noise in the Panasonic decoder is very apparent in, for example, dark areas with horizontal lines. For that reason you should only use it for a preview, never a final render of your program.

[Marcus Van bavel]

Suggest you look at Raylight, see https://dvfilm.com/raylight

[Marcus Van bavel]

DVFilm Raylight will allow you to drop the MXF files directly into Premiere without conversion. The pixel aspect ratio can be square(1920 x 1080 or 1280 x 720) if that’s what you want.
Get it at https://dvfilm.com/raylight

There is also a way to convert AVI’s captured with DVRack into Raylight AVI’s with corrected pixel aspect ratio, without recompression. Here is some info on that

https://dvfilm.com/cgi-bin/board/main.cgi?board=Raytricks

[Marcus Van bavel]

You’ll need the DVCPROHD decoder for quicktime windows. Get it
at https://dvfilm.com/raylight/decoder

[Marcus Van bavel]

Raylight AVI’s must be created by RayMaker which runs in Windows. They are either the same size as the MXF files (self-contained variety) or much smaller (proxies).

[Marcus Van bavel]

Raylight (using RayMaker) can convert the MXF files into AVI’s readable by After Effects with no recompression, so there is no need to create the uncompressed files.