AVID vs FCP: image quality

DonWoo2

DonWoo2

New member
Has anyone noticed a significant difference in image quality when dealing with the native format .xmf in Avid vs. converting the .xmfs into Quicktime movies via FCP? Does Quicktime compress the image quality at any level?
 
I haven't worked with the XMF's in AVID, but there is no (re-) compression involved in the transfer to Quicktime. It's just a plain translation of bits and bytes - AFAIK.

Other than that:
FCP handles the DVCPRO-HD format pretty nicely, so far.

Gunleik
 
hmmmm??? you watching exact same clips on exact same monitor, same room conditions (light vs dark etc). are you having to downconvert to a 480i monitor...maybe the downconversion renders are different between avid and QT... so original files would be the same, but downconverted could be different????
 
From what I have seen at NAB and from what I know about the process, the rewrapping of MXF's in QT format makes no difference with image. It is still all digital... just a bunch of 0's and 1's. I do look forward to the day when FCP can handle native MXF files and give access to all of the metadata.

Ned Soltz
 
I haven't noticed any difference personally but people I've talked to have expressed concern about it and I didn't have an immediate answer for them.
 
The image quality between Avid and FCP is the same. Sounds like a little snobbery to me. And yes, from my very limited glipses at Edius, it appears to be a remarkably fast and intuitive NLE.
 
Apple has stated that only a wrapper is added and there is no quality loss.

I am currently a Mac user, but once I get a new Intel Mac with Bootcamp, I really may make to switch to Canopus. I hear only great things.
 
evinsky said:
There is NO diffrence.
Click to expand...


On the contrary, i have noticed a difference in quality in my live capture window in FCP to the captured quicktime DVCPROHD clips. You can do this test yourself- Set your browser to 100% and expand it to full view. Then play a clip in the browser, DVCPROHD resolution. Then open your capture window (it should be the same size as the browser window at 100%). Set your camera to 720p24 recording (non native), then preview in the live capture window. Its good to get some blacks in the preview window. Observe the image very closely. Do a capture now using the 720p24 setting in FCP. Preview that captured clip in your browser- you will see the blacks are slightly higher then the preview in the capture window.....

Dont know why FCP does this. All i know is it looks better (richer black) when not using a FCP captured file.

Also, AVID and FCP are indeed quite a bit different in their codecs. If you look a while back you can see comparisons using apples DV codec and AVID's DV codec- they looked very different. I suspect the same thing goes for DVCPROHD codecs. Dont rule it out unless you yourself have done direct controlled comparisons.

Rhydon
 
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There is a difference in the playback codecs.

If you're doing a firewire capture, both will capture absolutely identical footage. But if you're extracting stills, they will look different depending on what computer you extracted them from. Avid and Apple's codecs uncompress slightly differently.
 
The image quality will be the same on any NLE that handles it. The folks who talk like this don't understand that MXF is a wrapper, and not the actual image data. I can assure you, it's all the same image no matter what.

Oh, and judging an image by your computer screen? Especially the capture window? Come on, that's a reflextion of your computer monitor's ability to handle HD, that's all.
 
Not necessarily true though. The uncompressor does leave some room for interpretation, and in the tests I conducted between FCP and the Avid codec in Vegas, there were certainly differences. But that was FCP4.5, and I believe they updated their codec in FCP5.
 
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