Color Sampling Problem with MXF in Adobe Premiere!!!

[basspig]

I discovered this while troubleshooting a sound problem with native MP4 XDCam files. I solved the audio glitches by using the MXF wrapped files instead. I have two identical projects, one with MXF, one with MP4. The MXF has visible jaggies on strong colors, particularly the reds in the background flags in the frame below. The jaggies are nonexistent in the MP4 version. Examples below:
http://www.basspig.com/PMW-EX1_MXFvsMP4.htm

[xenno]

Thank you, very helpful. Have you looked into conversion of the mp4 codec into the cineform codec and how that translates? As a solution, when you import the mxf files, are you only fixing those specific glitches or are you replacing the entire audio file? Do you know of anyway to batch convert the mp4 video and lock it to the mxf audio?

[basspig]

I looked into Cineform way back in February, but quickly realized that it's entire workflow circumvents any benefit of tapeless workflow, not to mention that it requires 3X the disc space for files, creating an almost impossible archiving situation out of an already challenging one (reminds me of the days of using PKZip across 140 floppies to pack a large prepress project before SyQuest carts became available). In addition to that, Cineform had some strange problems with black level shifting depending on whether video was playing or paused.

For the glitches, I've replaced the entire file. Specifically, I import the MXF version, take the audio track, render to a 16/48 PCM file, insert it into project and separate the MP4 version from its audio, then replace that audio with the audio I've extracted from the MXF version. That seems to give the best of both worlds.

So far, no one on the Adobe Premiere forums has picked up on the issue. I'm planning to file a bug report soon.