[Neil Patience]

I have tried making H264 files with Compressor, Adobe media encoder and Telestream Episode and the results between them are pretty much the same give or take.
Matrox have some good hardware accelerated H264 encoding butI have not used it so hard to say if it will significantly improve things in your case.
I think your fundamental issue is having to shoot with 18db gain which is going to make things noisy as you have obviously noted.
Clearly the H264 compression is emphasising the noise in your master which to a degree is to be expected.

When you say ‘distorting the image’ do you mean adding noise or changing th aspect ratio ?

Perhaps another approach might be to try to de-noise your footage – have a look at Neat Video’s noise reduction plug-in. It is very good at noise removal without adding too many atrifacts along the way.
Could be a good solution for you.

best wishes
Neil
http://www.patience.tv

[Neil Patience]

Probably the best de-noise software at a reasonable price is Neat Video.
They have a bit of an old school website but it is an excellent plug-in for reducing noise. You will need the pro version for HD.
I think there is a trial version – be worth a shot

best wishes
Neil
http://www.patience.tv

[Neil Patience]

Is there a reason why you are restricting the bitrate to 5000kbits/sec
If you increase this you will get better quality – I think the max is somewhere around 30,000 or so – but it would be worth experimenting with increasing that above 5000 for sure.

best wishes
Neil
http://www.patience.tv

[Neil Patience]

Ok – Proxy files are designed for offline/online edit workflows. They are low res so will affect the look of your footage. Its really an unessesary step with XF 300 footage.
I would just transcode to 442 and work and finish with that.
Make sure you use a decent 7200 RPM Firewire 800 external drive (as a minimum) for your media. You should be OK then.

best wishes
Neil
http://www.patience.tv

[Neil Patience]

Just to add to Shane’s very good advice.
When you re-compress it again to make your H264 for delivery or encode to DVD etc etc you will lose a little quality so it may not look quite as good as your original file. This is normal and nothing you can really do will stop that from happening but the method suggested is going to give as good as you can get with that source.

best wishes
Neil
http://www.patience.tv

[Neil Patience]

I would guess the most likely reason for your performance issue, given the spec of your Mac is pretty good, is media drive speed.
How is your raid connected ? Firewire 800, for example, is only really good for a single stream of HD – after that it will possibly start to choke. (Use the AJA drive speed tool to check your drive speed)
So if you regularly do jobs where there are 2 or 3 or more shots on the screen at once, or multicamera stuff, you might want to look to using a faster interface.
Additionally when FCP starts doing odd things a good idea is to trash the preferences and re-set it up. (FCP pref manager does this quite well – free download)
That clears out some buggy behaviour that often cant really be explained, and speeds things up a little.
Finally which ProRes codec do you use ? – obviously 442 HQ and 4444 demand high bandwidth and again will give playback issues unless you have very fast drives.
Obviously some, or none, of that may apply in your case and you may well have tried most of it, but hope that helps.

best wishes
Neil
http://www.patience.tv

[Neil Patience]

I have, until now, not come across a situation where media has been stored within the fcp.app folder.
However what you need to do is right click on the fcp ap and select show contents (or is it show package contents) – either way do that and it will open like a normal folder and you should be able to locate your file and move it onto your external with everything else.

Odd one – wonder how it got there.

best wishes
Neil
http://www.patience.tv

[Neil Patience]

I am pretty sure the XF300 can only shoot in varieties of HD – its minimum recording quality is 25mbs 720 up to full hd 50mbs.
Unless the US spec ones are different (I am in Pal land)

Transcoding to ProRes should not introduce any additional noise. I have used footage from these cameras a few times and found the quality to be good.
Which ProRes codec are you using ? I would usually use 422 or even HQ with 10 bit 4:2:2 files.
L&T wont change the frame size so what size are your imported clips ?
That should tell you if they are full HD or not.

If they are not you may be introducing some quality loss if you are editing them into an HD timeline.

Noise certainly is associated with low light so that is possible.

best wishes
Neil
http://www.patience.tv

[Neil Patience]

I am not sure flicker remover would be the ideal for exposure changes – unless they happen as fast as ‘a flicker’
I suspect the exposure changes are much too slow to be ‘flickery’
You can download a fully working trial of Sapphire that I think lasts 2 weeks so you can give it a go for free.

Its actually not an easy thing to totally fix – I dont know about the AE plug-in so worth looking to see if that helps.

Otherwise its worth a try using the colour corrector to smooth out the changes as much as possible. Use add edits (sorry Avid term) blade tool to mark the different exposure sections and then adjust each to be as similar as you can get them. Then put dissolves bewtween to smooth out the changes. It wont be perfect, but it may just be enough, depending on how big the variations in exposure are.

best wishes
Neil
http://www.patience.tv

[Neil Patience]

How are you getting the footage into FCP ? The easiest way is to use the FCP Log and Transfer tool in order to transcode to ProRes.
You shouldnt need any other ‘convertors’
You can download the XF plug-in for free from the Canon website – its in the software downloads for the XF300 camera.
The MXF to ProRes transcode is very quick, roughly a third realtime.

You will need a card reader – I would back up the cards before you do any more. Dont change the file structure on the cards, or try to pick out the MXF files – it needs them to be as they are for the plug-in to work.
Once you are good to go simply install the plug in – open the L+T tool and point it at your media you can then import and transcode all your clips and they should look as good as the originals.

best wishes
Neil
http://www.patience.tv