Steve Maller Photography

I recently purchased a new Canon XF100 video camera to replace my Canon XL2. I primarily film events, presentations, interviews, bar mitzvah and wedding ceremonies, and the like. I was attracted to the XF100 for several reasons:

• direct-to-compact flash recording with media rollover for continuous recording
• 50mbps 4:2:2 editable codec (no rendering in Final Cut Pro timelines)
• XLR inputs with phantom power

So the other night I took it on its maiden voyage. I filmed a local theater group’s play for my very first “real” assignment with the XF100. It took a few minutes to figure out the audio inputs, as I was shooting with a line input from the sound board in input A and my Sennheiser shotgun in input B. One thing to report is that my Sennheiser does not fit in the mic mount (it’s too thin). I guess it’s easy to wrap it in gaffers tape or something, but I think I’m just going to use my shock mount in the cold shoe.

I shot at 35mbps so that I could get 57 minutes out of my two 16GB cards, knowing that I was transcoding down to DVD for delivery. I was very happy with the overall performance during the filming. I used my $30 OEM battery and it still showed over 50% capacity after 2 hours of runtime. I used autofocus and it worked well. I shot wide open at 1/48 and 0db gain, and that was perfect, along with tungsten white balance.

I used rsync (a built-in Unix utility in OS X) to copy each of the CF card images to my hard drive. Then I used Log and Transfer in FCP to wrap the video in native form to Quicktime (not ProRes). Everything went swimmingly.

But I ran into an interesting problem in DVD Studio Pro. I used the Compressor preset “DVD Best Quality 120 Minutes” setting to transcode to DVD format. Then I created a DVD Studio Pro project to burn the DVD itself. But the DVDSP muxing process error’d out, with very little information other than “Bad Video File Error”. Nothing I tried would work. So, on a hunch, I re-encoded (2 hours!!!) the video using a 1-pass encode (to save time), but dropped the VBR data rate a bit (4.6-6.0). And that worked. So I re-encoded overnight with the 2-pass encode using the lower data rates and it worked properly.

I’ve done hundreds of DVDs and I’ve never had a problem of this nature. Is there too much data in the files? I’m perplexed. Doesn’t seem rational.

Anyway, I’m a happy camper!