Editing with Avid DNx Codec

In another thread there was a pointer to the Avid quicktime codecs. I grabbed them and started playing around with them.

Has anyone had any success editing with and DNxHD timeline in FCP? My quick experiments with my G5 Quad and Kona LHe show mixed success. I am able to create a DNx timeline, but it plays in the canvas with reduced frame rate, and I don't find a setting for the Kona card that will allow playback on an external monitor.

I used to have a workflow that using the DNx codec would have been useful, but now my interest is mostly academic.

-Vance

AVID's codecs are proprietary so Kona would have no way of playing them efficiently. One might be able to work out a system of DNxHD in FCP but it would be on a worst case scenario only. Playback only in FCP viewer/canvas, one couldn't capture to it from within FCP.
This would strictly be a neat trick to get you or someone else out of a deep hole, so as you say, academically it might be worth seeing if it was possible.

ak
Sleeplings, AWAKE!

What Andrew said. I have been able to edit this footage fine...with some stuttering, but not bad. And there is NO WAY any FCP capture card will play this out. Avid proprietary only. I ended up converting to ProRes with Compressor. Set it up, let it go all night. Looked great.


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Noodling around showed pretty much what you guys said, tho I didn't try rendering back to ProRes.

My real disappoint was using the codec with Motion. Because Avid claims that the codec can carry alpha I was thinking about using it in place of Animation+ for moving things from Motion to FCP. Unfortunately it seems to create only a full frame alpha, and that is inverted Avid style.

Oh well.

-V

AVID DNx Codec - only useful for exporting final product so it can play in an AVID - I found on my one and only try with this that when you try to play it back on a mac (once you've exported to QT DNx -- that the audio sync seems to be off a bit - but when I brought it to a PC Avid it played fine - go figure.

V,

I've played around with this as well as we have many Avids and a couple of FCP macs. Same as above. I read about MXF4QT used in conjuntion with an EVS (with IMX not DNx) and it really got my wheels turning. I wonder if it would allow a FCP mac to cut with DNx EVS mxfs?? I'll have to go back to the site and look at the specs.

We've had pretty good sucess feeding our Media Composer stations FCP Quicktimes and editing with them but not the other way around.

Andre


\\update: [mxf4mac.com]

Looks like you can work with straight up DNx mxfs, alas this is all academic.

Andre-

Just curious, what codec are you using with your EVS XTs?

-V

We have two XT2 and generally we run one in DNxHD (I'm gonna say 220Megs maybe 145??) and the other in IMX50. Our production house is basically run on Windows Avid (I'm one of two FCP stations in-house. As you know, DNx is Avid's HD codec and IMX is their SD codec (or at least the one we chose when setting up the system.) I feed off of the IMX XT for what I'm doing and the rest of the house can use either depending on their needs. I just do a simple Send To in IPDirector but Avid was a little trickier. It took us forever to get everything right.

We have MediaXChange but rarely use it. You could set up a scan folder on an XT network and send DNx mxf files to it for transcoding to a more friendly codec.