Up to this point, I've been using Adobe Premiere Pro for editing video files. But I've wanted to do some mixed animation and video for a while. Adobe After Effects can do some special effects, but after having searched around for alternate tools, Blender seems to neatly integrate video editing with animation capabilities in a more flexible manner, for a lot less money.
The positive aspect of Adobe Premiere Pro is that is seamlessly works with Panasonic's P2 originated files. Blender, on the other hand, almost handles things, but not quite. I was surprised that Blender with directly work with the DVCPRO MXF video files. No problems there.
On the other hand, Blender doesn't recognize the MXF wrapped audio files. Since Blender already knows how to deal wit the MXF wrapper on the video side of things, I wonder how much work would be required to make it familiar with the MXF audio file wrapper.
In case there is extra decoding work, I came across an open source utility for dealing with MXF metadata: Advanced Authoring Format. This library may be of use for decoding MXF metadata.
But since I don't have time to look into it directly, I needed an alternate work around. As I work on Windows, I think there are various Windows utilities around for dealing with the issue from a GUI perspective. But changing into directories, clicking on files, choosing conversion methods, and making the conversion seems to be too much like work. I like command line stuff.
The program FFmpeg fits the bill quite nicely. But it needs to be wrapped up in a batch job in order to process a bunch of files automatically. I could try something in Windows PowerTools, but since I have a Linux background, I have cygwin installed on my computer. It provides a wide variety of linux tools and allows them to be run in a Windows environment.
The first of the following two lines: 1) lists one file per line, 2) pipes the list to awk, which 3) formats a command with ffmpeg to convert the .mxf audio file to a .wav file, and 4) outputs to a command file. The second line then executes the command.
ls -1 | awk '{print "ffmpeg -i " $1 " " $1".wav" }' > file.sh
sh file.sh
ffmpeg needs to be somewhere in the path for this to work. Running the command effectively doubles the amount of space required for keeping the audio files available.
The .wav file can now be loaded into Blender for use along side the video file.