[Michael Miller]

DeckLink drivers are indeed up to date.

I’m fairly certain we aren’t dropping any frames, but I’ll double-check that.

The storage medium is 3xOCZ Vertex 2 SSD RAID 0. Read speed is about 650MB/sec (bytes, not bits), so I don’t think that’s a concern. The clip is an MOV, 10-bit uncompressed 4:2:2. Both the clip and the sequence are set to one stereo channel of 16-bit 48KHz.

[Michael Miller]

Hi Andreas,

The reason your P2 footage shows as 1280×1080 is because that is the real resolution of the image. Panasonic squeezes the image horizontally to save space, and then FCP and other apps stretch it out to the correct 16×9 aspect. The reason this does not happen in your XDCAM EX footage is because EX is shot at real 1920×1080. However, if you were shooting older XDCAM HD, that’s actually shot in 1440×1080 🙂

If you want to read more about how this all works, check out Wikipedia’s article on pixel aspect ratio at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel_aspect_ratio

As far as your timeline preset goes, I would recommend you set it to DVCPRO HD 1080i, as long as you have the disk space to store it. Since you’re working with two mismatching formats, FCP will *always* need to render either one or the other. In this case, that means the XDCAM EX footage will be rendered to DVCPRO HD.

-Michael

[Michael Miller]

How mathematical about this would you like to get? If you’re willing to really dig into it, learning about the nuances of MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 Part 10 (AVC/H.264) would be a good start. They’re the basis of many codecs nowadays.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG2
– Basis for XDCAM, HDV and DV/DVCPRO HD

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264/MPEG-4_AVC
– Basis for AVC-Intra and AVCHD

In my professional life I’ve found that DVCPRO HD is a good option since it renders quickly, looks good enough for my needs, and I have access to more storage than I need so the bit rate isn’t the issue. If I was pressed for storage, I would use XDCAM HD422. If I was very pressed for storage, I’d use XDCAM HD.

Hopefully someday Apple will allow you to export AVC-Intra. At that point I’ll be a convert 🙂