[Serge Noel]

I just finished a project done in AVC Intra on FCP 7. I would like to mention that with a color compressed codec such as AVC-Intra Apple ProRes did not do the great job you might expect. It would turn out noisy when slight nuances of green, brown or gray were involved. My project what shot a lot outside, so that was a problem. I should also say in all fairness that more contrasty stuff looked fine.

But the project I am working on is going to end up in 35mm via Arrilaser, and so getting the most out of the original media WAS a concern.

We ended up doing some sort of a conform back to .mxf. Two options exist as far as I know what would allow this. 1) You can finish up on Avid, use AMA or Boris AAF to do so (not very mac like, but that is what we did because it was cheaper in our situation). Or 2) on mac, you could also conform using the .mxf to .dpx tool panasonic provides (DPX Conversion Plugin). I used this second option to enter AVID with some clips that Nitris would not recognize for some reason. It worked fine, but it is slow.

One thing you must do is select in and out points with the panasonic Viewer, before the export. Again, tedious. But really worth it when you want all the color latitude you can get.

I hope this can help someone.

Serge