DVFilm and Raylight

It’s not easy explaining my job to friends and family. I explain “I help write software that helps film makers in their post production editing”. My bio on our website describes what I do more succinctly: “…develop new software products for the Raylight family of plugins for HD editing”. People generally understand that but to be more specific requires some knowledge of film post production work flow and/or familiarity with high-end video editing software such as Sony Vegas, Adobe Premier, or Apple’s Final Cut

Specifically, this is how our software can help a film maker during editing.

DVXUSER.COM is the place to go for discussions and help on film making. Our Raylight product is well known and recommended there because it solves some work flow problems.

Here are some of the threads at DVXUSER describing why people use our products:

DVXUSER  thread on best workflow for HVX200:

I have redundancy in my workflow without needing create duplicate files by re-wraping the MXF files into QTs. The other is eliminating the ingest time. Log and transfer of P2 media is fast but when you add up the time on long form shoots, it can really become unruly. The day I bought it, I saved about 3 hours of ingest time on a project that had a lot of footage needed a quick turn around time. Raylight takes mili-seconds to create a .mxf.mov pointer file. These pointer files play natively in FCP and Quicktime (easily preview shots in QT or FCP, rather than P2CMS).

There are other useful features that occasionally come in handy – removal of 1080pA duplicate frames, creating “P2″ cards from any quicktime video (can use the camera to play HD files), even editing P2 files natively in FCP directly from the card.

I would rather that FCP plays well with P2 than use Raylight but I have found it to be another tool to increase efficiency in my workflow from capture to output.

P2 Card transfers

cheap pc laptop- P2 re capture to mac workflow

How Raylight works around Apple’s Final Cut software issues

“Get Raylight, and all this will disappear. Raylight fixes every problem that Apple seems to introduce. It seems like every other version Apple breaks something in their log & transfer/import P2 functionality. Raylight has been stable and fixes all that, plus it lets you avoid all the duplicate file size stuff and the time it takes to import footage. Now more than ever I consider Raylight a mandatory portion of an FCP workflow.”

Q. Raylight is a way to access your P2 footage without changing or converting it in any way? I guess what I want to know is does it actually remove the pulldown or just let FCP see it that way. Can Raylight in any way change the information I save from each P2 card dump to my hard drive. I downloaded the demo but am still a bit confused.

A. FCP does a translation of MXF files into Quicktime files all in one go. Raylight does it on-the-fly, as-needed. So your original footage stays untouched in MXF format, but Raylight creates a Quicktime reference file that FCP can use.

The difference is that you get instantaneous access to your footage, instead of having to go through the Log & Transfer process. And you can work from the original footage or even the P2 cards if you want, whereas FCP’s Log & Transfer forces you to take up twice as much space by creating Quicktime files (which take up space but also take time). Plus, because you avoid the whole Log & Transfer process, you avoid any issues that crop up when Apple breaks their system (which has happened on more than one occasion).

So Raylight doesn’t change anything. Your original footage stays intact, unmodified, untouched. But it can automatically skip 24pA pulldown, which is very nice and gives you access to the true pure raw 24P footage.

“I would say most people I know who shoot HD and edit on a mac absolutely use Raylight. Its a no-brainer and makes the post process totally painless.”

Ultimately yes, it’s the fault of Apple for insisting on converting away from the native file format when no other editor makes you do that. However, that’s completely overcomable on both sides — on the Apple side you can use Raylight and edit the native MXFs and never run into this again. Or, on the Windows side, now that the damage is done, you can use the Raylight Quicktime Decoder and access the Quicktime DVCPRO-HD files.

So either way Marcus can bail you out.

Concise statement of why you use Raylight with FCP even though there is a way to ingest MXF files directly with FCP

Accolades to Mark for Raylight

THANK YOU for doing all that you’ve done to solve these problems of various manufacturers not playing nice with each other! You’re truly a hero to the HVX community! - Barry Green

if you work between the two Operating systems, Raylight maybe the only RAY of hope

Yet another FCP problem… sigh. My stock answer is always the same: try the demo of Raylight and see if it doesn’t just make all your problems go away…

Raylight is the program Panasonic should have shipped with all their P2 cameras

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I recommend to everyone to ditch Apple’s Log & Transfer, and use Raylight instead

Raylight is, IMO, absolutely essential
for FCP users wanting to use P2. It does many things for you. The first
of which is, all that time you spend in the log & transfer window
just disappears. Raylight creates
quicktime reference files instantly, so you can just plug in your
external drive and edit instantly. No importing, no logging and
transferring, just immediate editing.

Second thing is, FCP’s import window occasionally just refuses to import perfectly valid clips. Raylight always imports them. So you’ll save yourself some frustration there.

Third, Raylight
uses the metadata, and in fact can use it rather intelligently. It can
sort your clips based on the metadata into individual project folders,
doing some manner of media management for you automatically.

Fourth, you get access to the User Clip name function, so you can name your clips with custom names in-camera, and Raylight
preserves them. So when it comes time to edit, you don’t face a bunch
of 0003RU.MXF files, you instead get “Marriott Commercial Take
1.mov”-style names.

Fifth, Raylight lets you author virtual P2 cards and export them back out to cards, if you have need of doing so.

Run, don’t walk, to get it. It’s the best P2/FCP workflow enhancement tool on the market.

Raylight is a $200 PLUGIN that tricks FCP into reading .mxf files without ingesting them (changing the .mxf header into a .mov header). FCP reads the pointer files created by raylight for example: 001AB.MXF.MOV

It is a huge time saver. [Link]