"Wrong Format" on Avid XPress 5.8
by Kerry Dye
on
May 7, 2008 at 3:02:45 am
Okay, so I have a 90 min. feature that was originally edited on, I believe, Avid Adrenaline. I'm now trying to open it on an Avid XPress 5.8 install and all of the MXF media (1080p/23.976, DNxHD 175 X) is giving me that happy "wrong format" screen.
After reading these boards, it sounds like my problem is that the clips were captured at a resolution that XPress doesn't support. It further appears that I'm going to have to go to someone who *can* read this resolution and have them transcode it to something XPress can read.
Now, for the experts (and with thanks in advance), a few of questions to help me on my path:
1. Is there any way to tell, given one of these MXFs, what resolution it's in?
2. What resolution do I need it in for XPress to be able to work with it?
3. Any guesses as to how long it will take to transcode 100 minutes of DNxHD 175 footage? (Got a time crunch happening.)
Re: "Wrong Format" on Avid XPress 5.8 by Michael Phillips on May 7, 2008 at 1:02:25 pm
Got to the STATISTIC view of your bin and look at the Video column. It will tell you what format/res. Xpress Pro can read 115 and 175 but not 10 bit or DnxHD 36. Transcode should take about 2-3x real time depending on CPU. Another, albeit more costly solution would be to upgrade to the Media Composer software and get all the support including uncompressed while the upgrade promo is still going on?
Re: "Wrong Format" on Avid XPress 5.8 by Michael Hancock on May 7, 2008 at 1:11:08 pm
[Michael Phillips]"Another, albeit more costly solution would be to upgrade to the Media Composer software and get all the support including uncompressed while the upgrade promo is still going on?"
If you can spend $500, definitely upgrade.
If you have to rent a Media Composer suite, transcode, bring media back, work at a lower quality (8-bit versus 10-bit) just to likely relink to the original 10-bit material at the end...you'll rack up $500 worth of time and expenses pretty quickly. Plus, you'd have a Media Composer from here out if you upgraded.
Re: "Wrong Format" on Avid XPress 5.8 by Kerry Dye on May 7, 2008 at 1:57:55 pm
Hmm ... they're 175, but I was reading on another thread about 20:1 vs 2:1 and that XPress Pro doesn't support everything (sorry for my ignorance, but I'm not 100% sure what those ratios refer to. Compression? Resolution?)
Regarding upgrading (thank you to both Michaels for the advice) that's an intriguing option, but I'm working on a MacBook here, and I'm reading specs that say Media Composer doesn't support HD on laptops (also, the Avid store is advertising a 2-week wait for that upgrade, and I've got a deliverable in 3. D'oh.)
So, assuming I have to have everything transcoded I want to make sure I transcode into something XPress Pro can read ... so any further advice in that direction would be a huge help.
Hey, you guys are really helpful, and I've got another (possibly bigger) problem. Let me start a new thread on that one momentarily ...
Re: "Wrong Format" on Avid XPress 5.8 by Michael Phillips on May 8, 2008 at 11:22:15 am
Xpress Pro will pkay back a subset of resolutions (and yes, those are resolution terms). A safe one to use is to transcode to DV25 if you want to edit proxies.
