P2 mxf and Premiere Pro 2 working( sort of)

E

eLeventy

Well-known member
As stated somewhere, Adobe's new Premiere Pro 2 doesn't support Panasonic's P2 and MXF, so people who are used to PPro seem to be out of luck.

As an avid Avid user, I decided to have a look at the new PPro2, as I might want to use it for going uncompressed out on a DecklinkHD.

And it's true: premiere doesn't like MXF, and refuses to look at it. But then I started poking around a bit, and lo and behold, after 5 minutes I was editing P2 files in Premiere nativly!

The trick seems to be the way FCP uses P2, namely, a quicktime wrapper. In Avid, I select all my P2 clips at once and export them as a quicktime reference file. This process takes only 1 second. A Qt ref-file is only about 8kb.

Then over to Premiere, simply import those quicktime reference files( also a 1 second job), and your up and running.

I admit, not a very elegant solution( you have to have both Avid and PPro2), but it works quite well( minimal manual work), and moreover, it opens perspectives for a better workaround for those wanting to cut on PPro: it must be quite simple to write a small app that creates a QT-ref file for the MXF's you throw at it.

It does not mean however, that I'm gonna start cutting on Premiere, I way prefer my Avid. Long ago I started on Premiere( 4.2 I believe) as a hobby, now I'm editing on Avid professionaly, and haven't looked back since. But still, it's nice to have options.
 
So if you want to use Premiere, all you have to do is buy Avid!!! Great!. Wait a minute? You mean, I could just buy Avid and edit on that...

Good find though, maybe someone (other than raylight) can make a "working" codec for PC people.
 
tak1108 said:
Good find though, maybe someone (other than raylight) can make a "working" codec for PC people.
Click to expand...

The nice thing is, you don't need a "working" codec, Premiere works out of the box with MXF, it just doesn't know it! A quick hack( besides Avid) would do it.
 
eLeventy said:
The nice thing is, you don't need a "working" codec, Premiere works out of the box with MXF, it just doesn't know it! A quick hack( besides Avid) would do it.
Click to expand...

That's amazing you did it!

You're a genius.

Do you think it will work with older Premiere's... like 1.5?
 
.

.

Interesting. So, if you then export your hacked files from PPro, does it save them as Quicktime files?
 
:dankk2: ...whoah!!!

How fast is your machine? How fast is render time? How close to real time is it?

Thanks!
 
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Are you sure ...my god, it’s a revelation..!!!
Been covered
Your cracked Avid will be fine as a MXF converter for PPRO2
 
very cool - if you want to edit in premier for the effects or something its good to have options
 
Can anyone else confirm this? I have Avid and Premiere Pro 2.0, just no HVX footage yet. (getting the camera next month). Is there anywhere I can download hvx mxf files? I'll try it out and post my results along with speed and quality tests.
 
good find - but a quick hack may not work as as your AVID install has the DVCPROHD codec with it. Surely this too would be needed to work with premiere aswell as the mxf unwrapper.

Try uninstalling Avid and see if the P2 files still work in Prem. My guess is they wont as the DVCPROHD codec for PC will be removed.
 
some observations:

-It works both in PPro2 and in PPro1.5 ( just tested it)
-Playback is choppy on the Premiere timeline. On my machine( AMD 3500+) it drops ( alot of) frames. I guess about 10 frames/sec on a 720/p60
-Preview rendering takes ages ( 5 minutes for a 20 sec clip)
-It also works for QT-ref's of Avid sequences: you can drop all your clips on the timeline in Avid, export that sequence as a QT-ref, and pick that up in Premiere. You get a long sourceclip containing all your clips.
-Is this usefull/workable? Hey, I don't know, you decide :-)


I only know Avid, not Premiere, so you might get better results with different project settings. I don't have enough material to try out all different settings: mixing and matching correct 1080, 720, 24p, 25p, 60p,...

For those who have Avid and Premiere wanting to try yourself, a quick guide:

1: get some P2 mxf's. Google around, look here on DVX, or look here.

2: Make sure your Avid is in mxf-mode, not omf: Settings - Media Creation - Media type( last tab) - mxf

3: copy the mxf's direcly to the avid mxf folder: D:\Avid MediaFiles\MXF\1\ using explorer. If you were in omf-mode, this folder might not exist yet. create it yourself( mind capitals), or let Avid do it by creating/capturing some new media.

4: Create a new Avid XpressproHD project. Be carefull about the settings( 1080/p24,...). If the project settings framerate and the clip settings don't match, Avid will refuse to use the clip. Experiment a bit. Go to the mediamanager, select current project, and your drive. Your clips should show up. Drag and drop the master clips to the timeline.

5: select the clip(s), right-click, and export. Settings: Quicktime Reference. Make sure that the option 'use AVID DV codec' is checked. otherwise your end up with a white clip in PPro. Also, check 'Color Levels: 601/709' for correct color rendition. It automatically names it after the mxf source-file, which is handy.

6: Go to Premiere. Create a new project. For the best playback settings, your on your own, I don't know Premiere well enough. But just about any setting, even DV, should give you output. Import the QT-ref file, and your clip.mov shows up in the bin. Open it, and observe.

Why? P2 works quite well on Avid, and I like the Avid-workflow. But for a long-form project I'm working on, we want to do color-correction and effects ourselves, and master to D5/HDCAM. In Avid it is only possible on a Media Composer with an AdrenalineHD, which is $100k+.

The complete workflow-idea we have at the moment is:
-edit in Avid XpressProHD
-export QT-refs sequences to Combustion for CC and FX
-export sequences to uncompressed 10bit
-assemble all uncompressed video sequences and 5.1-sound from the DAW in Premiere.
-Use a Decklink HD and a RAID system for mastering to HDCAM

If this works, we have a complete end-to-end high-end, D-cinema-ready HD setup for about $7.500 of hardware.

eLeventy
 
Darkline said:
good find - but a quick hack may not work as as your AVID install has the DVCPROHD codec with it. Surely this too would be needed to work with premiere aswell as the mxf unwrapper.

Try uninstalling Avid and see if the P2 files still work in Prem. My guess is they wont as the DVCPROHD codec for PC will be removed.
Click to expand...

Your probably right( I'm not going to uninstall my Avid to try :) ). In the export settings, I have to specify 'Use Avid DV' codec.

However, the Quicktime codec pack is downloadable here. So, in theory, with Quicktime and this codec pack, it should be possible to make an app that writes a .mov that references to the mxf-file and instructs to use the Avid codec. It would mean diggin around a bit in the Quicktime API.

The reason why the playback in Premiere is choppy is probably because it is an Avid codec, not native to Premiere
 
When I try to import any MXF files all I get is an error saying it is not a valid XDCAM
MXF file. What am I doing wrong? I am following all of your steps to the the "T"...
I think!
 
no you didnt - you tried to drag the clips in from explorer - you need to drag them in from the media tool
 
THey never show up in the media too! Until.......I checked 2 additional boxes on that particular screen. It's where you tell it what drives you have media on. Apparently after a default install the box that said "media clips" or somthing wasn;t check. So once I checked it all the MXf files appeared!

Yay!

Now.....how do we move mxf files to these AvidMediaFiles directory and keep all of the metadata and audio intact? My initial tests I moved only the video mxf files....what do I do with the audio and thumbnails, etc?
 
icicle22 said:
Now.....how do we move mxf files to these AvidMediaFiles directory and keep all of the metadata and audio intact? My initial tests I moved only the video mxf files....what do I do with the audio and thumbnails, etc?
Click to expand...

Using Windows Eplorer, copy all audio AND video .mxf files ( normally 4 audio and 1 video per clip) to the /Avid Mediafiles/1/ directory Forget about thumbnails, metadata, etc. All metadata is also contained inside the .mxf files, and Avid is able to read that. The .xml metadata file is just for applications that don't handle mxf fully. And the thumbnail is not used.

Avid groups all files( audio and video) and shows it to you as 1 master clip. Even if you recorded 1 very long clip over 2 cards( and in fact created two sets of clips) is shows up as one seamless clip.
 
How do we know what audio files go with video? When I looked into my audio folder the numbers didn't match the video numbers? Or should we bomoving the entire P2 card contents over in their respective "audio" and video "folders" and then avid can make the proper association based on that?
 
The numbers do match. There's just two additional numbers at the end to signify which audio channel.

Example:
video/0113QU.MXF
audio/0113QU00.MXF
audio/0113QU01.MXF
audio/0113QU02.MXF
audio/0113QU03.MXF
 
Confirmed. I got this to work as well, using the NOLAdoc mxfs linked above.

I copied the mxfs to the Avid Media Files folder and in Avid Xpress HD exported the quicktime reference file. (Used the recomened settings that eLeventy posted, although it defaulted to 1440x1080, and I changed that to 1920x1080).

The qt refernece file was created very quickly and was instantly playable from my desktop with quicktime pro. (Although only at about 10fps). The reference file seperates your audio and video (.mov and .aiff file), these would have to be re combined in the premiere timeline.

I created a new Premiere Pro 2.0 project and selected (Adobe 1080 SDI) as the video format (not sure, but this seemed like the best chocie). Importing the qt refence file worked fine and was instantly playble from the timeline although it had the red render needed bar above. On the timeline, I got pretty decent performance, I think about 20fps. (Just seemed slightly choppy).

I tried renedering the clip, thinking that would improve playback perfomance, however it had the oposite effect. (After rendering, it seemed to only playback around 15fps).

My system specs are as follows:

P4 3.4GHZ w/ HT
1GIG DDR RAM
System drive (which i was using for playback since it is my fastest drive) is 2x WD 10,000 RPM SATA Drives in RAID 0

It's cool that this works, as I hate Avid Xpress. (I find it clunky and finiky and old-skewl when compared with my spanky new Premiere 2.0) . Don't get me wrong, a high end Nitris is great, but the Xpress software stinks. Premiere is much more intuitive for me and reliable, although it's not good enough performance for doing any serious editing work with P2 MXF in Premiere. I'm going to try raylight now.

This workflow is a neat trick, but until adobe get's it's ass in gear on DVCPROHD support, I fear that I will be cutting all my HVX work on Final Cut or even the dreaded avid.
 
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