You can import DV and DVCPRO50 MXF files at 60i, 24PA, 30P, 50i, or 25P (PAL) directly into Premiere and Vegas.
RayMaker will also convert all these formats into self-contained DV or DVCPRO50 AVI's respectively. The sound will be taken from the appropriate Audio MXF file.
To playback DVCPRO50 MXF in the timeline, or the DVCPRO50 AVI, you need the DVCPRO50 codec from Matrox, which is a free download from their website at
http://www.matrox.com/video/en/support/digisuite/downloads/softwares/codec/
To playback DV-AVI files, your editing system will supply an appropropriate
high-quality DV codec. Vegas uses the Vegas DV codec. Premiere Pro uses the Main Concept DV codec. Some other applications like Windows Media Player will use the Microsoft DV codec.
DV or DVCPRO50 frames will have a pattern of gray squares over the image when you play back the AVI. Purchase the release version of Raylight to remove the squares.
IMPORTING THE MXF or AVI INTO VEGAS
Import the MXF or AVI into Vegas as you would with any clip. The project settings should be taken from the NTSC or PAL presets, unless you shot at 24P, in which case the frame rate should be set to 23.976.
Pixel Aspect Ratio (PAR)
For MXF files, the PAR is set automatically if the .xml files (CLIP folder) are present.
When an AVI clip is brought into Vegas, the pixel aspect ratio (PAR) defaults to square pixels (1.0). This is because Vegas uses a table of known video formats to set the PAR, but DVCPRO50 is an unknon format to Vegas. So you must manually set the clip properties to a PAR of .9091 for NTSC. If you want to change the PAR setting for a bunch of clips all at the same time, here is a script written for Vegas that will do that:
Download it here.
The script sets the Pixel Aspect Ratio for all video to the desired value. The value must be edited in the text file. Then the file extension of the file needs to be changed from .txt to .js and then drag it into the appropriate script folder, for example C:/Program Files/Sony/Vegas 7.0/Script Menu
Common PAR values are
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0.9091
1.2121
1.0926
1.4568
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NTSC 4:3
NTSC 16:9
PAL 4:3
PAL 16:9
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These values must match your project settings for best results.
After the value is edited into the script and the script copied to the scripts folder, use Tools->Scripting->SetAspectRatio to run the script.
For Premiere the same problem with PAR occurs, but there is no known method to change the PAR for all clips at once. Use MXF import to get the right aspect ratio.