In the Vegas files list in explorer all files have a nice appropriate little icon. But not the MXF file, it just has a standard anonymous Windows generic icon... Anyone?
Lars, just wanted to let you know that MXF files in Vegas explorer for me do have the correct icon. The one with the little orangy arrow pointing down on a grayish brackground.
Well, I never noticed it before, because MXF files show up as thumbnails, with the settings that I use in the Vegas 9 Explorer. Since most systems do not, by default, have a media player that will "auto open" an MXF file (which is a wrapper, like MOV and AVI), there is no icon associated with the file type.
If you have the freeware VLC Media Player installed and you set that as the default reader for MXF files (It plays them fine, BTW, even the "dreaded" XDCAM HD 422 50 mbps flavor), you will get the little orange "traffic cone" icon associated with MXF files, but that icon just shows that VLC is the default program for reading these files.
I'm finding VLC does a pretty amazing job of playing back .mfx clips. Any reason to use the XDCAM player over VLC?
Edit:
OK, I've found a good reason to use the XDCAM player: that is that with VLC I can only play an XDCAM from start to finish. I can't shuttle around. With the XDCAM player I can shuttle around all I want. The preview resolution is degraded somewhat in the XDCAM player though. With VLC, you can see the .mfx video at full glorious resolution. With the XDCAM player you are watching some sort of lowered resolution version. Still handy though as long as you aren't previewing for final quality.
2nd Edit:
If you are in the XDCAM player and you go to Tools/Options and check the "use alternative renderer" tab, the player will use your GPU and give you much better video quality preview. This is very cool now.