This guide is written for those guys who have trouble in editing Canon EOS C300 mxf footage with Adobe After Effects CS4. Although Adobe announced that mxf is supported natively in AE CS 4, and mostly the software allows you to import Canon EOS C300 MXF to AE CS 4 and edit them, the MXF videos may hop back and forth when you play them. Why should this happen? Let me explain it. Firstly you get to learn a bit about MXF. MXF is a “container” or “wrapper” format which supports a number of different streams of coded “essence”, encoded with any of a variety of codecs, together with a metadata wrapper which describes the material contained within the MXF file. MXF has been designed to address a number of problems with non-professional formats. MXF file format is not compatible with many programs. So you may have problem to play, edit or use these format. So are Canon C300/XF300/XF305/XF105/XF100, Panasonic HVX200/HPX300 MXF files, P2 MXF files, Sony MXF Files, etc.

By the way, in order to play Canon EOS C300 MXF videos on PC smoothly, your processor must be very powerful. In a word, if you want to make a short film from MXF footage with Adobe After Effects CS4/CS5/CS5/5/CS6 and prefer fluent playback, an Canon EOS C300 MXF to Adobe After Effect Converter definitely helps. Converting temporally compressed footage to a spatially compressed format is always recommended for performance reasons. Here I recommend you a powerful and useful MXF Converter from UFUSoft. The program converts Canon EOS C300 MXF footage to editable formats (*.avi, *.mpg, *.f4v, *.mov, *.mp4, *.wmv, etc) and obtain HD quality (1920*1080, 1440*1080, 1280*720). Converted file can be easily imported to AE CS 4 for editing.

Step 1. Load Canon EOS C300 MXF files to MXF to After Effects Converter.
The UFUSoft MXF Converter as a Canon EOS C300 MXF to Adobe After Effects converter can help you convert and compress Canon EOS C300 MXF videos to After Effects. You may either click “Add” button to import .mxf files, or directly drag and drop the files into this program. You are allowed to take snapshots when previewing the movie. Double-click on a file to preview when you would like to preview it.

Step 2: Click the drop-down menu of “Format” to select output format.
This Canon EOS C300 MXF to Adobe After Effects Converter is able to output proper formats for video editing software and devices. To import MXF to Adobe After Effects, I follow Adobe Premiere/ Sony Veags tab and select MPEG-2 (*.mpg) as output format. Alternative formats are WMV, AVI, MOV, DV, etc. If you’d like to combine multiple MXF files to be a single file, you can select all files and click Merge.

Step 3: Click “Settings” button to adjust audio and video parameters.
To make good control of the output file size and quality, you can adjust all the items in the following interface, including codec, aspect ratio, bit rate, frame rate, sample rate, and audio channels. To bear least quality loss, you may view the video information in the Preview window (or select the MXF file and click “Property” button to check file info) and set A/ V parameters according to the source Canon EOS C300 MXF file. Note this could lead to huge file size. A way to cut file size down is to set smaller value in Video bit rate box.

Step 4: Click “Convert” button to start compressing Canon C300 MXF to AE CS4/CS5/CS5/5/CS6.
The following window will show you clearly about the conversion information, which will help you to manage your time and storage space in a proper way. After the conversion completed you can click on “Open” button in the main interface to get the generated files and load the compressed video to Adobe After Effects CS 4. If you do not want to wait for the whole conversion process through, you can choose “Shut down computer after conversion” before compressing Canon EOS C300 MXF to After Effects CS4/CS5/CS5/5/CS6 and leave it alone.