iChat - Convert Canon C300 MXF to DNxHD 36 for importing to Avid Mac lucy198754 - Thu Apr 19, 2012 9:50 pm Post subject: Convert Canon C300 MXF to DNxHD 36 for importing to Avid Mac
Canon EOS C300, as part of Canon's Professional HD Cinema System, brings the expertise and decades of experience in designing sensors, lenses, image processing and design to the world of motion picture capture and meet the needs of cinema industry professionals. Different from EOS C300 PL, EOS C300 has a Canon EF lens mount and is compatible with all of Canon's new EF Cinema lenses and current EF lenses, including compact primes, super telephotos, specialty tilt-shift, macro and fisheye - over 60 in all. The most attractive featre, besides the unique Super 35mm Canon CMOS sensor, is that EOS C300 provides outstanding cinema quality movie capture with the revolutionary Canon DIGIC DV III Image Processor and 50 Mbps 4:2:2 codec.
But according to Avid users' say on the forum, EOS C300 seems not to be so perfect. Although having installed the AMA plug-in and 2.0 of the Canon XF plugin, you will still find it unable to play and import Canon C300 MXF footages to Avid Media Composer on Mac. You will only get the notice that "Only MXF files created by XDCAM hardware devices are currently supported". Since both Canon and Avid firmly state that the Avid v5 can handle XF files, you can not rely on them to give you a solution. You have to find a third party software help you bridge your C300 MXF footages with Avid Media Composer.
Among all the converters listed by Google, the MXF to Avid Converter for Mac seems to the most effective one, which can convert C300 MXF files to DNxHD 36 on Mac with original quality in the least time. Besides, it can deinerlace the 1080i files if you choose 59.94i (NTSC) or 50i (PAL) as frame rate while shooting. The deinterlacing will make your footages more smooth in Avid Media Composer. May the following steps on how to transcode C300 MXF Files to DNxHD 36 help you solve the incompatibility problem.
Step 1: Instal and launch the best MXF to Avid Converter on Mac.
Click the button “File” to add MXF files to it. (Note: You should find the MXF videos from one MXF whole structure folder, or you will get the converted files without any sound). If it is necessary, you can double click the each file to have a preview.
Tips:
1. If you want to merge MXF files, just need to check the “Merge into one” box.
2. You shouldn’t move the single MXF video out of the whole MXF whole structure folder, or the MXF video would be wrong such as without audio.
Step 2: Select an output format for Avid Media Composer and set the output folder.
Click on “Format” and you will get a dropdown menu, then move you pointer to Avid Studio> Avid DNxHD(*.mov). The Avid DNxHD(*.mov) format is the only available format when your Avid Media Composer is installed on Mac OS X Lion. Then you can set the output folder by clicking “Browse” icon as you need.
Step 3: Click “Settings” icon to adjust audio and video parameters.
Click the “Settings” icon and you will go into a new interface named “Profile Settings”. You can adjust codec, bit rate, frame rate, sample rate and audio channel in the interface according to your needs or as original (59.94fps) and optimize the output file quality. You can refer to the screen shot below.
Note: You’d better set the video frame rate as 29.97 or 30 fps, video size as 1920*1080 and select the audio channels as 5.1 channels to keep the best quality for editing in Avid Media Composer. If you put the converted files via AMA, please set stereo as channels, which will be more suitable for AMA.
Step 4: Start to convert your Canon C300 MXF files to DNxHD 36 without loss of quality for Avid Media Composer.
Click the “Convert” button; it will transcode Canon C300 MXF footages to DNxHD 36 for Avid Media Composer on Mac immediately. You can find the process in the “Conversion” interface.
When the MXF to DNxHD conversion process with MXF to Avid Converter is 100% completed, you will be able to get the output files for Avid Media Composer by clicking on “import” button effortlessly. Now you can easily put the converted Canon EOS C300 MXF files to Avid Media Composer for editing in perfect sync of video and audio without quality loss.
