[Mark Weber]

Several thoughts:
1. I have the XF105. Like the camera very much. I am starting to experiment in video (was previously shooting 35mm and medium-format film still photography). I find that I can get the manual control for gain, aperture, shutter speed w/o much difficulty. The camera is also not too heavy and is nice for run-and-gun types of situations. The integrated hardware (as opposed to using a DSLR with addons) also appeals to me. If I were looking for a higher end camera, I would probably look at the C100.

2. Canon appears to have discontinued all of their tape-based HD cameras. Seems like that technology is disappearing.

3. Memory-chip based video capture is much easier. I found moving all of the DV tapes I had from a previous Sony camera was very time consuming and painful. With the XF105, I can move a days shooting to my computer in 5 minutes and be looking at it in FCPX within 5 more minutes. Life is too busy to wait on tape.

4. The price of the XF105 seems to be falling significantly. It used to be around $4500 but it now can be obtained for around $3000.

5. Not sure how much of an impediment the single chip sensor is. Many of the high end cameras are also single chip. So I suspect other factors are more important (sensitivity, resolution, quality of the sensor, etc.).

6. It is probably worth looking at the BBC report on the XF105 that was prepared by Alan Roberts:
https://tech.ebu.ch/webdav/site/tech/shared/other/WHP034-ADD65_Canon_XF100-105.pdf

Mark

[Mark Weber]

One possibility – do you have settings where the gain is turned very high and the ND filters are also engaged?

Might be other things but this type of situation could cause noise to be higher because the ND filters are effectively offsetting the gain at the expense of higher noise levels.

[Mark Weber]

I have not tried importing into FCP7 (use FCPX instead with an XF105) but you might try looking at the following link which seems very helpful:

https://blog.abelcine.com/2012/02/07/how-to-import-c300-footage-in-avid-fcp-x-and-premiere/

There is a section for FCP7. The XF300 uses the same format files as the C300.

Hope this helps.
Mark

[Mark Weber]

You need the Canon XF Plugin for Final Cut Pro X (current version is 2.1.1) which allows FCPX to read the MXF archives:

https://www.usa.canon.com/nw3s/CanonUSA/DownloadContents/English/0200247102EN.htm

To ingest the files, first I use the XF Utility to create an archive/copy of the CF memory card.

Next, I go into the import function in FCPX and select the archive which is in the “XFUtility” directory. The archive will have a name of the form yyyymmddxxxxxx where yyyymmdd is a date the archive was first created and xxxxxx are some other numbers. I then select either “Import selected” or “Create Archive….”.

This is the procedure I use for an XF105 which is the same process as the XF300. It is worth making sure that you have the current versions of both the XF Utility and the FCPX plugin.

[Mark Weber]

Eugeny
That worked – thanks much for the advice and insight.
Mark Weber

[Mark Weber]

Thanks for the suggestion.

Perhaps I am not doing it correctly – I created an alias to the shared disk directory in the finder which is called “Final Cut Camera Archives” in the “Macintosh HD/Users/xxxx/Movies/” directory. When I double clicked on the alias in the finder, the link worked. However FCPX is still not finding the Camera Archives. I also see the same behavior when I create the link using a Unix shell command.

Any suggestions are most appreciated.
Thanks,
Mark Weber

[Mark Weber]

I had a similar question. I am currently using Adobe Lightroom 4 to manage my greater than 10K pictures which are a mixture of 35mm and 6×6 scanned pictures in Adobe DNG format. I do not want to convert them to JPG, TIFF, or bit map formats because I would loose all kinds of editing and keyword information, or loose on image quality.

Given that FCPX has evolved considerably since this question was originally posed, I figure it is worth revisiting. Does anyone know of a plugin which allows FCPX to read Adobe DNG files?

When I look at the link:
https://help.apple.com/finalcutpro/mac/10.0.4/#ver2833f855
I see mention of Adobe PSD files but not DNG files.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions on either plugins or possible workflows which would allow this.

Mark Weber