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Advice Needed– FCPX Native Support and other things
Need some advice on which cameras and which HD acquisition formats work natively with FCPX (i.e. you don’t need to transcode, re-wrap, or render the footage (once it’s on the timeline)). I’ve personally only used AVCHD and that codec is not very edit-friendly. You have to transcode the footage first is my understanding . Our business needs something that we can edit with fast, and not much render time. We are looking at a $5,000 budget for each camera. going to be getting two cameras. we are leaning more towards file-based formats. We are also considering LTO drives for the Mac. Any advice on that would be helpful as well.
Things are gettin’ interesting…
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4 Replies
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[Andrew Hays] ” I’ve personally only used AVCHD and that codec is not very edit-friendly. You have to transcode the footage first is my understanding “
FCPX handles AVCHD directly although the better the CPU/GPU the better the handling. FCPX also can transcode to ProRes in the background so you can start editing AVCHD immediately and handling improves and the transcode completes. Nothing needs to be transcoded first for AVCHD.
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I’m not sure what your concerns are about re-wrapping files. I have been using Sony’s XDCAM EX format in FCP X. Sony’s XDCAM Transfer does a great and quick job of re-wrapping the files to *.mov. I’m not sure if XDCAM Browser does the same thing.
I edit the re-wrapped media in FCP X on my early 2008 Mac Pro with an ATI 5770 card and 24 GB of memory and I have not had any issues. I leave background rendering off as well.
I have not used Canon’s XF300 format, but when I was looking at it, there seemed to be some issues that needed to be addressed to make it easier inside FCP X.
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Some of the material we use is shot on a Canon XF305 and I get it onto a hard drive via FCP7 using the Log and transfer function.
This has now become the only use I have for FCP7 ( AKA Legacy )
The preferences scroll down provides a choice of codecs from 422HQ down to Proxy. Within that is a Native setting which is the one we use.
At only 386MBs file size per minute (6.1mbs) with no discernible loss of quality this makes a good choice if you are concerned with ongoing media storage management.
(422HQ produces a 1.38 Gb per minute file size! )
The Native import a file wrapped as XDCAM HD422 1080P which seems similar to the Sony XDCAM EX format Kevin Patrick mentions.
Any Canon DSLR files are pre transcoded to Apple Pro-Res 422(LT) with Mpeg Streamclip prior to being referenced to within FCPX.
This again is simply to keep a handle on the huge amounts of data generated with HD material and to tick all the import boxes in FCPX doesn’t give you the same level of control.
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thanks for all the info guys. My boss settled on a couple of JVC Everio’s for lightweight stuff and JVC HM150U’s for the really big shows.
THe only problem I had at the time I posted about re-wrapping was the amount of time it would take to re-wrap the footage. Thankfully, FCPX doesn’t need to re-wrap anything for the 150’s since they shoot QT files natively.
..and knowing is half the battle.
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