Importing XAVC from A7S

S

Swink

Active member
How are people importing and viewing the footage from the A7S? I managed to find a store in Montreal that had one. I shot some rough footage on my way home (by subway). I'm trying to import it into Premiere CC 2014, but it won't see the clips. I also tried Prelude and the Mac Finder. I'm used to the folder structure because I had a FS100 (which Premiere never had an issue with). I'm probably missing something obvious.

Thanks,
Tom
 
The clips are the mp4 files in something like /private/mp4root/clips or something. I don't have it in front of me so I might be missing part of it. One nice thing about xavc s is, unlike avchd, it is supported by davinci resolve so worst case with any workflow you can process footage first through resolve.
 
nyvz said:
The clips are the mp4 files in something like /private/mp4root/clips or something. I don't have it in front of me so I might be missing part of it. One nice thing about xavc s is, unlike avchd, it is supported by davinci resolve so worst case with any workflow you can process footage first through resolve.
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How is the xavc codec? Is it robust enough to grade on in Davinci without transcoding?
 
Thanks! Found them. :)

I was looking at the AVCDH "folder" because that's what I was used to looking at with the FS100. Of course, it was empty because I didn't shoot any AVCHD ...

I can now report that Premiere plays the files just fine.
 
old editing software required that, because it worked within the limitations of the imported footage
not needed anymore, since the days of CS5 (maybe even CS4)
 
Has anyone imported the XAVCS footage into Resolve? It doesn't seem to find the audio track. Says 0 audio tracks and plays no sound. The video track works, though.

(I'm trying Resolve because I wanted to try putting the Sony Slog2 to Rec 709 LUT on it, just to see what would happen. It makes most of my shots blown out.)
 
Swink said:
Has anyone imported the XAVCS footage into Resolve? It doesn't seem to find the audio track. Says 0 audio tracks and plays no sound. The video track works, though.

(I'm trying Resolve because I wanted to try putting the Sony Slog2 to Rec 709 LUT on it, just to see what would happen. It makes most of my shots blown out.)
Click to expand...

I second that - premiere imports well but no Timecode.

Resolve on the other hand - No audio.
 
I've got no sound after importing in Premiere. Here's a screenshot of what i'm seeing. http://cl.ly/XNuX I import the selected clips, pop them in the timeline and there's no audio track associated with them at all. Any ideas?

I've also tried just importing the PRIVATE folder as a whole. Still no go.
 
markinhifi said:
I've got no sound after importing in Premiere. Here's a screenshot of what i'm seeing. http://cl.ly/XNuX I import the selected clips, pop them in the timeline and there's no audio track associated with them at all. Any ideas?

I've also tried just importing the PRIVATE folder as a whole. Still no go.
Click to expand...

If you double click the clips do you see/hear audio in the source panel? When you first import files Premiere takes a minute to create PEK files so you won't be able to play the audio. But that doesn't last long at all. I see you don't have your audio selected. See where it says V1, try selecting the box right below that in the audio section so A1 will be highlighted. Now try dragging in clips and the audio should follow. Back in CS6, drag and drop used to override any source patching for inserts and overwrites, now, unfortunately it doesn't. But hopefully that should solve the issue for you. Hopefully. :)
 
Has anybody tried to work with XAVC-S from the a7s in Premiere, in a laptop without dedicated graphics? How is performance?
I'm about to buy a laptop, and I'd want it to be as light as possible, but those don't usually come with a dedicated graphics card. If it can load the clips and I can do a preview and a basic cut without any effects, that's good enough for me.

My top contenders right now are:
Toshiba Satellite Z30-A-1DJ: 13.3" 1920x1080 IPS? screen, but driven by the 4400 graphics in its intel i5-4210U processor. 1.2Kg
MSI GP60 2PE-052XES: 15.6" 1920x1080 IPS screen, 4GB and GT840M DDR3, but 2.4Kg (cheaper than all the others)
MSI GE60 2PC-480XES: 15.6" 1920x1080 IPS screen, 4GB and GTX850M GDDR5, but 2.4Kg
MSI GP70 2PE-032XES: 17.3" 1920x1080 IPS screen, 8GB and GT840M DDR3, but huge and 2.7Kg (not really that much heavier than the 15.6" models, actually...)
 
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I'm really not a computer guy. I embarrassingly don't know if I have a graphics card. I have a 3 year-old base model 15" MB Pro with 8Gigs of ram (upgraded from the original 4Gigs). A7S XAVC-S footage in Premiere works fine.
 
Thanks. That's probably using a Radeon HD6XXX, which is not bad at all even for today's standards. My problem is that I'm aiming for about half of the price of a 15" MBP, and insisting on a nice 1080p IPS screen :)


edit: I think I'm going to go for the 17.3" one... the 15.6" ones are smaller but not that much lighter, and the 13.3" one is just a different beast. So different that I may actually get one like that too in the future. But right now what I need is a portable editing machine and 13.3" may not be enough for that.
 
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Has anybody tried to work with a7s footage on Premiere CC on something like a Macbook Air?

Background:
Still trying to decide. Now I'm leaning towards the 13" Toshiba: I definitely want a small and lightweight notebook, I may as well buy it first, and if it's not good enough to be an edit machine with XAVC-S then I can buy the other one... or I can get an external recorder instead, since ProRes should definitely work even on the tiny notebook, right?
I loaded some a7s clips into a similar 13" laptop with Intel integrated graphics. Playback in MPC-HC is fine but just scrubbing in Premiere CS5 is already kind of painful. Maybe a newer version will do better, and I'm thinking about the upgrade to CC...

Too much stuff to buy, too little money
 
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