XAVC Import to FCP X

Jody Eldred · June 28th, 2015, 11:14 PM

For what it's worth, I've used XAVC extensively on my F55 in HD and 4K and I find it to be a very elegant compression algorithm... plenty of room to color grade, plenty of ones and zeroes without artifacting yet manageable files sizes.

Ricky Sharp · July 4th, 2015, 09:19 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ricky Sharp

For the vast majority of my footage, I plan to record in 29.97. And if I opt to toss the original XAVC-L, the total storage requirements are the same comparing XAVC-L vs. ProRes solutions.

Oops, my calculations contain a flaw :) I didn't account for the fact that if working with XAVC-L footage, the transcoded ProRes (optimized media) need not be stored indefinitely. Thus, space-wise, it is still better to import the original XAVC-L clips.

Updated calculations based on 50 Mbps 1080p XAVC-L:

22 GB/h (original copy from SD card transferred to the computer; this can be purged depending upon how critical the footage is).

22 GB/h (FCP X's copy of the footage after import)

66 GB/h (29.97) or 123 MB/h (59.94) of Scratch drive storage for transcoded media

22 GB/h backup of FCP X's imported media

22 GB/h backup of original SD card data if needed.

18 GB/h of output (Blu-Ray @ 35 Mbps and Web @ 6 Mbps)

18 GB/h of backup of the output files (I plan to start backing these up too now)

Most cases will involve purging of the original card data after a while and no backup needed of that either. So this gives just 40 GB/h of storage on my main drives and the same 40 GB/h on my backup drives. Not bad at all.

If needing to keep and back up the original SD card data, this jumps to 62 GB/h each for the main drive storage and backup drive storage.

Bob Searl · July 4th, 2015, 01:45 PM

Hi Ricky-- yeah, I have found that the ProRes files continue to be much larger, in every case, as well. I will go back to archiving the camera native files, and get rid of the ProRes files after editing. That's what I had been doing before with AVCHD anyway.

I still haven't made up my mind on editing native XAVC files versus ProRes however. Right now I am sticking with ProRes, unless I find out that there is an advantage to editing in the camera native files format.

June 28th, 2015, 11:14 PM	#16
Jody Eldred Mustang. Legend. Join Date: Jun 2006 Location: Los Angeles, CA Posts: 36	Re: XAVC Import to FCP X For what it's worth, I've used XAVC extensively on my F55 in HD and 4K and I find it to be a very elegant compression algorithm... plenty of room to color grade, plenty of ones and zeroes without artifacting yet manageable files sizes.

July 4th, 2015, 01:45 PM	#18
Bob Searl Regular Crew Join Date: Apr 2015 Location: WILMINGTON, NC, USA Posts: 26	Re: XAVC Import to FCP X Hi Ricky-- yeah, I have found that the ProRes files continue to be much larger, in every case, as well. I will go back to archiving the camera native files, and get rid of the ProRes files after editing. That's what I had been doing before with AVCHD anyway. I still haven't made up my mind on editing native XAVC files versus ProRes however. Right now I am sticking with ProRes, unless I find out that there is an advantage to editing in the camera native files format.