• Location: Fernley, Nevada
• Mood: optimistic

The MXF Challenge

If anyone wants to see why it's a challenge to get the video out of the new camera unless you have Adobe Premiere Pro (which apparently has written into it the workaround for the way Panasonic arranges files in the P2 camera), I have put a 15-second clip we shot on the camera in its raw form in a Zip file on Google Docs. Warning: this file is 54MB compressed! It looks like there's a minimum clip size on the camera, so the size doesn't directly scale with the length of the recording.

The zip file Card04.zip will decompress into a directory CARD04 that has a CONTENTS folder. Inside that folder are these subfolders:

AUDIO
CLIP
ICON
PROXY
VIDEO
VOICE

AUDIO and VIDEO are what's important, and the latter is where it stored 15 seconds of video in >50MB.

Some research warns that changing the file names or directory structure will ruin everything. There are lots of programs out there that will convert the individual MXF files, but I don't see anything that will overlay the audio onto the video in synch, and spending several hundred more dollars on APP is unpleasant. (Although if we're unable to obtain a license through one of the non-profit corporations that would be using this, I may end up having to do it.)

Fortunately, several people including pcornelius have said they have a handle on programs that may be able to do this, but I'm putting this challenge out there so that anyone reading this who can help can try the solution you propose yourself and see if it works.