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Long story short, I've been given some footage from a Sony FS5 which is in MXF. Like anything Sony working with this stuff is a nightmare. Nothing I've tried can open these files. People keep saying to just use Content Browser in PPro to import but even with file structure straight off the card I get a "generic error".

Sony's own Raw Viewer doesn't work either, it detects the MXF files but won't play any of them much less transcode. They have a RAW plugin on their site but it's only for CS6 and up.

Can anyone help please??

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  • The RAW viewer may not be working as it doesn't appear that the FS5 does RAW internally. It supports RAW export via SDI to an external recorder, but only with a paid software upgrade. Internally, it will be some other format in the MXF wrapper. If you can specify what format you were recording in within the MXF container, then it might help with more direct suggestions for fixes, though I suspect Resolve (mentioned in my answer below) will probably open whatever it is.
    – AJ Henderson
    Aug 17, 2017 at 15:31

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You've hit the very unfortunate planned obsolescence issue. Adobe only updates their software for a limited amount of time, so when working in RAW formats, you eventually hit a point where the old software simply will not work with the footage from new cameras anymore.

Your options are unfortunately a bit limited. You can either update to a newer version of your editing software or use a different software for transcoding. I'm not particularly familiar with Sony's workflow as I use an Ursa Mini (which uses CinemaDNG), but I'd suspect there to be at least a few options available for ingesting and transcoding MXF as Sony is a significant enough player in the space.

Looking at the documentation for Black Magic's DaVinci Resolve, it looks like you might be able to use that. I can see from their documentation that MXF is a container format, so it's going to largely depend on what the video format within the MXF is, but DaVinci Resolve has a pretty long list of supported MXF codecs. If it does support it, Resolve has a free version that could likely be used to do your transcode for you. In the beta of Resolve 14, you can simply add the files to a project, go to Media Management (under the File menu) and it will let you transcode all videos in the project to another format of your choice.

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