Wednesday, June 17, 2015

Issues within Sony AX-100 4K XAVC S and Premiere Pro

Summary: Does Premiere Pro have native support for Sony AX-100 4K XAVC S files? If you are trying to import 4K XAVC S to Premiere Pro for editing, you may wish to read this post.


The Sony AX-100 camcorder records 4K and HD movies in XAVC S, a consumer friendly format based on the XAVC codec developed for 4K/HD and professional use, which uses MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 for video compression and linear PCM for audio compression, while saving files in a MP4 wrapper. However, if you want to import the XAVC S videos from Sony AX-100 to Premiere Pro for editing, you may encounter incompatibility issues.

“I can not get Premiere Pro CS6 to recognize the 4K XAVC S files from AX-100. I get the ‘generic error’ message all the time. is there a way to get it to work?”

To be clear, Adobe Premiere Pro CS5, CS5.5, CS6 and the latest PPro CC don’t have native support for Sony XAVC S footage wrapped in MP4 recording format. If you are searching for a plug-in to help you open Sony AX-100 4K XAVC S video in Premiere Pro, the searching results may let you down, that’s because presently there is no such a kind of plug-ins available for viewing and editing XAVC S MP4 footage in Premiere Pro and other mainstream editing programs like Avid Media ComposerFCP X and Vegas Pro.

Since XAVC S codec is a new one, and is not widely supported. For those who stick with Premiere Pro, a quick fix is to convert AX-100 4K XAVC S to Premiere editable format such as MPEG-2 before editing. Pavtube HD Video Converter for Mac is the solid tool to help users make the 4K XAVC S to Premiere Pro transcoding on Mac OS X Yosemite.

                             

How to convert Sony AX-100 4K XAVC S to Premiere Pro for editing?

Step 1: Install and import AX-100 4K videos.
Backup your 4K XAVC S videos from your AX-100 camcorder to hard drive. Install and launch 4K HD Video Converter for Mac. Drag and drop 4K video files to the software. You can import multiple files at once thanks to batch conversion.



Step 2: Set Premiere Pro friendly format.
Click the drop-down list in the format line to get the format box. Then choose “Adobe Premiere/Sony Vegas>>MPEG-2 (*.mpg)” as output format.
Tips: WMV (VC-1) (*.wmv) and MOV (AVC) (*.mov) are both supported. Generally, MPEG-2 is a well-accepted file format for its ability to keep up the video quality and its popularity.



Step 3: Do some simple edit work.
De-interlace: By default the 4K HD Video Converter for Mac will apply de-interlacing facility to some clips that are interlaced. Just click “Edit” to enter the video editor, switch to “Effect” tab, and check the “Deinterlacing” box.

Trim: Basically, video hosting sites restrict video clips to be in certain file size and length. For example, YouTube stated that “videos can be up to 2GB in size and 10 minutes long”. You can trim the video to desired length with this HD Video Converter for Mac. Simply click “Edit” menu>>”Trim” tab and set start and end time point.

Merge: To join multiple videos together, just select them in file list, and tick off the checkbox “Merge into one file” on the main interface.

Step 4: Start to convert AX-100 4K XAVC S to Premiere friendly format.
You can preview to check the final result. Once you are satisfied with it, click the “Convert” button to start converting AX-100 4K XAVC S to MPEG-2 .mpg format. It will take you a little while.

Conclusion: After conversion, you’ll get no troubles in editing AX-100 4K XAVC S in Premiere Pro. Follow the steps and have a try!

Further Reading: