.mxf footage in FCPX running Mountain Lion

[Mark Moreve]

HI All,
I have been trying to import .mxf footage from my c300 into fcpx but I'm running Mountain Lion. The Canon Plugin doesn't work on Mountain Lion & FCPX will not recognise my footage. Has anyone else had this problem & what are they doing ? I see there are quite a few third party .mxf convertors out there. Has anyone had any expereince of them ?
Cheers
Mark

[Alan McCormick]

Hi Mark, I use the Canon XF300 which has MXF files - I downloaded FCPX trial and then downloaded the Canon FCPX plugin for `lion.

I have a MBP with Mountain Lion installed btw.

1. Before installing the FCPX plugin for `lion I had to alter one of the plist files to fool my system into thinking it was still at the Lion version.
2.Only then did I install the FCPX plugin.

3. Then I restored the original Mountain Lion plist. before starting up FCPX

4. Now I can import MXF file individually as FCPX can see them and I can even import a section of a clip if need be. The best part is I can work on it straight away as it continues to import in the background.

The only bad news is I do not have the step by step procedure to do the plist conversion but I am sure you can find it on the internet somewhere.

I lied, just found it - here it is https://vimeo.com/groups/canonxf/forum/topic:252578

[Paul Joy]

And now with FCPX 10.0.6 it's possible to use Canon mxc without transcoding it...

Editing Canon MXF footage in Final Cut Pro X ( FCPX ) without transcoding | Paul Joy – Freelance Filmmaker

[Nigel Barker]

You don't transcode MXF file when using the Canon plugin. It re-wraps them as QuickTime friendly .mov files while copying them to the FCP X Events folder.

As far as I can see the new functionality in 10.0.6 is specifically for XDCAM MXF files using 3rd-party plugins.

[Paul Joy]

The main advantage is that you can edit directly from the source media files rather than creating a duplicate set of media that uses up valuable storage space. After using Premiere for a year or so I find having to re-wrap or transcode media very old hat, I guess if you're coming from FCP7 it seems more natural.

[Nigel Barker]

If you are using the option of copying all the files that you use to the FCP Events folder then the re-wrapping takes no extra time. I rather like the way that FCP X can keep all your working files together so that it's straightforward to move a whole project from one machine to another. Premiere Pro's Project Manager is a disaster when it comes to duplicating a project & seems to have particular problem with MXF files.

TBH I don't think disk space is that valuable nowadays & we already have as a minimum three copies of all cards imported so an extra copy in an Events folder costs peanuts even for one of our largish projects with 2-300GB of source files. A 3TB disk sufficient for 10-15 projects is only £100 now.

[Paul Joy]

I guess it really depends on what you work on. If you're doing weddings then it's going to be practical to archive projects on cheap drives because you're shots are likely to only be used for that project. For a lot of what I do I have to be able to access shots from previous shoots so I like to keep all of that material connected.

The big benefit of editing directly from a central repository of source material is that I can have multiple projects all accessing the same source files, if those files were scattered across multiple drives things would get tiresome very quickly with having to load drives to copy over specific shots.

I guess we all have different workflow needs but for me the ability to not have to duplicate footage has improved my workflow substantially.

[Alan McCormick]

The way I will use the "central repository of source material" for weddings is quite simply gathering footage for use in promos in the future! It used to be a drag finding clips etc but should be a breeze now.