The MXF Challenge

If anyone wants to see why it's a challenge to get the video out of the new camera unless you have Adobe Premiere Pro (which apparently has written into it the workaround for the way Panasonic arranges files in the P2 camera), I have put a 15-second clip we shot on the camera in its raw form in a Zip file on Google Docs. Warning: this file is 54MB compressed! It looks like there's a minimum clip size on the camera, so the size doesn't directly scale with the length of the recording.

( Technical Neepery )

Fortunately, several people including pcornelius have said they have a handle on programs that may be able to do this, but I'm putting this challenge out there so that anyone reading this who can help can try the solution you propose yourself and see if it works.

Sorting the Video

Thanks to nojay and many other people's suggestions, I have a workable if not ideal solution to getting the MXF files out of the camera and into a format I can upload to YouTube (MP4). It's not a single-step solution, but it will work:

( Checklist and more Technical Neepery )

As I mentioned, we're recording in SD, not HD, although the camera is capable of HD. It keeps the file sizes down and makes the uploads more manageable. I'm not terribly interested in HD video here; sound is one of the most important things here, not video. We understand that we can in the future get bigger cards and work in HD; however, currently, finances are strained to the max (note that $4K we dropped to get this far). We're planning in the future to also get a "proxy card" to create MP4 files on the fly straight out of the camera; however, this all costs money that we don't have. Lisa says, "I've already overdone; I'm not going to overdo more." Besides, we need to get a battery for the camera before the other accessories, and batteries for these cameras are not cheap.