Editing XAVC S in FCP X

A number of my Sony cameras, which previously shot AVCHD, are now shooting the faster, 50mbps XAVC S (note, I'm not talking about the Sony pro XAVC codec, but the one with the "S" at the end that they are putting into the smaller cameras like the RX10, the RX100 iii, and the A7s).

I used to have to transcode everything in AVCHD to optimized media, but has anyone had an luck, or advice, on how to edit native XAVC S files in FCP X?

Is this advisable, or is it still better to transcode? I'm looking for the most streamlined workflow I can get since the transcoding thing with AVCHD drove me nuts.

Thanks in advance! Bob Krist

Just what the world desperately needed: another video format.

Tom: Well, it wasn't my idea, but it seems a lot more Mac friendly than AVCHD. At least this codec will play in Quicktime without a lot of rigamarole, and it appears that you don't have to copy the whole card structure, as you did with AVCHD, to get FCP X to recognize it.

So I'm thinking that maybe it might be possible to skip the whole transcoding thing, but I don't know for sure.

It is still an H.264 format, so ideally* you are still transcoding.

*ideal as in, best performance/quality

Thank you! I was hoping against hope that I didn't have to do that anymore,but it's not the end of the world. Thanks for the info. cheers, Bob

Gooday, it depend on the mac specification and the duration of your edit as well for transcoding. I have tried using and edit a short presentation video ( 5 minutes duration ) without transcoding and it went fine. Just my 2 cents opinion.

Cheers!

You can use the Sony XAVC plug-in to solve this problem.

As Dan said: wether you need to optimize or not only depends on your hardware. No matter what format you are recording, it is best to do a test to see how well your system handles the specific format.

It's the CPU that decompresses your video footage, so the more CPU power your computer has the more chance you won't need to optimize anything.

When I get a new format to work on I just import it without optimizing and I start editing. If i see that my system starts to slow down I can always optimize the footage whenever i wish to get better performance.

- Ronny