Initial Stumbles
- Shot footage on an EX3 suitable for DVD and web. Following advice of “gurus” such as Alister Chapman, shot it in 720p50 mode. Having done so, wanted to get it into Final Cut for editing etc.
- Initially, used ClipBrowser (v2.0) to ingest the footage. Didn’t know if I should do it the same way I did on Windows for Sony Vegas, that is by generating a “.mxf” file or by generating a “.mov” file. Tried both. These are containers, not codecs. The “.mxf” file is Material Exchange Format while “.mov” is QuickTime.
- Wanted to know more about the contents e.g. the codecs used and their settings. To get this, used VideoSpec – a video analyzer broadly like GSpot on Windows)
- MXF contents: FourCC “mpg2” (MPEG-2), Bitrate 35000 kbps, fps 50, 1280×720, PAR 1:1, DAR: 16:9, Chroma subsampling format YUV420p.
- MOV contents: FourCC “xdva” (XDCAM), Bitrate 34900 kbps, fps 50, 1280×720, PAR 1:1, DAR 16:9, Chroma YUV420p.
- In FCP, tried to find a standard setting suitable for this, but nothing matched. In particular there were 60p formats but not 50p formats – frustrating. Instead made a “best guess” at the most closely matching format and customized it. I think I ended up with format “HDV 720p50” but was concerned that HDV may have different standards (e.g. number and aspect ratio of pixels) to that of my EX XDCAM footage.