• Apple Final Cut Pro Legacy

  Which camera hard drive plays nice with FCP?

  Posted by Steve Martin on January 30, 2007 at 5:09 pm

  Hello all,

  I have a JVC DV5000 (and plan to purchase a yet to be decided HDV camera) in the near future. I want to purchase a hard drive to attach to my camera to capture the video file as it’s being recorded to tape. The idea is to eliminate the capture process for post as well as creating a backup of my raw footage as I shoot.

  I looked at the Focus Enhancements website and their product doesn’t appear to be compatible with FCP. Seems odd – did I misread or misunderstand the chart? I want to buy one that makes it easy and fast to import into FCP without any transcoding or conversions.

  A few questions:

  1) What products play nice with FCP and can anybody share experiences?
  2) Does the timecode from the tape match the file from the hard drive?
  3) If I edit from the imported file and later need to re-capture the project from the original tapes are there any problems with that workflow?

  For example, I’ll be doing final post on an indi film that the director will be doing an HDV offline cut (native HDV codec) on his macbook then we’ll be doing the final edit in our suite (MacPro, Kona3) in the DVCProHD100 codec. So my hope is to open the offline edit session and re-capture from the original HDV tapes via my convergent design converter as DVCProHD files.

  I can’t really test this workflow until I get my hands on a hard drive.

  Any thoughts?

  Thanks,
  Steve

  Production is fun – but lets not forget: Nobody ever died on the video table!

  Steve Braker replied 19 years, 3 months ago 3 Members · 2 Replies
• 2 Replies

• 

  Walter Biscardi

  January 30, 2007 at 5:25 pm

  [Steve Martin] “I looked at the Focus Enhancements website and their product doesn’t appear to be compatible with FCP. Seems odd – did I misread or misunderstand the chart? I want to buy one that makes it easy and fast to import into FCP without any transcoding or conversions.”

  The Firestore is being used by a lot of folks with the HVX-200 and it works extremely well from what I’m hearing. A client of mine uses them exclusively now and they have dropped the entire tape workflow because of it. They use FCP and haven’t said anything about issues with it.

  I’m not sure Apple certifies third party hard drives any longer.

  Walter Biscardi, Jr.
  https://www.biscardicreative.com
  HD Editorial & Animation for Food Network’s “Good Eats”
  HD Editorial for “Assignment Earth”

  “I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters
• 

  Steve Braker

  January 30, 2007 at 7:52 pm

  You might want to look harder at the FireStore info. As far as I know all their products can be set to save as Quicktime, AVI, or Raw DV – and maybe one or two more. The FS-3 (and the version for the JVC cams) is the last model that will record to an external drive of your choice – a swift marketing decision on the part of Focus.

  Works great for me. You can also use the FS-3 / JVC version to record from anything else, though it would get a little bulky without a big camera to balance it. Tape is the backup, and it has been needed a few times simply because the poorly anchored FW cable comes out. Time for some gaffer’s tape there.

  One thing I wish FireStore would do is either default or allow setting to dual mono tracks. As it is everything comes into FCP tagged as stereo and it’s just a pain getting tracks separated again from there on.

  But it’s worth it so far.

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