I was recently given a DVD with seven .mxf clips from an editor on a mac running final cut. I've tried following the instructions in Vegas 8 help and nothing seems to work. Is it because he's using a mac and I'm on XP?
If they are DVCPro MXFs you need Raylight. If they are MXFs from Sony EX cams, then I think you need to re-wrap them to AVI using Sony's included software (I don't have one of these cams, but there are posts on this board about them).
Vegas Pro 8 will accept MXF files from the EX cameras directly into the timeline. No need to re-wrap. I have yet to find any issues with editing from them directly.
"Vegas Pro 8 will accept MXF files from the EX cameras directly into the timeline. No need to re-wrap. "
Vegas will accept MXF files from the XDCAM cameras, XDCAM EX is mp4 not MXF. It has to be rewrapped and merged to MXF to get it into Vegas. There have been issues with this and Vegas that the latest Clipbrowser corrects, that's why I always archive my camera original files and the MXFs.
Sorry Jay, no, they're in a MP4 container which in turn contains mpeg-2. Just open a BPAV folder in Windows and drill down to see how it works, you'll see a file something like "051_0270_01.MP4"
The Clipbrowser rewraps and joins (if needed) the files in the MP4 containers into MXF.
FCP and PPro can directly import the mp4 containers and join them on the T/L.
Yes, Jay, the A/V is encoded to mpeg-2.
They are contained in a MP4 wrapper. MP4 is a container just like MXF, neither MP4 or MXF are codecs.
As I said, don't take my word for it, open a BPAV folder and you will not see any file with a .mpg extension, they are MP4 containers with mpeg-2 vision and audio and all manner of metadata inside.