• Apple Final Cut Pro Legacy

  HDV in FCP – the definitive solution!

  Posted by Neil Weaver on February 16, 2009 at 2:40 pm

  Prepare to be amazed everybody – I think I’ve cracked it! This is how to import, edit and export HDV material in FCP. Well, 1080i50 material anyway.

  Importing:

  I got completely stumped by this for a while, until reading another post (i forget by whom so apologies for the lack of props) which suggested the reason that FCP doesn’t pick up a camera sometimes is because of the order in which it’s all hooked up. Incredible really, but that’s technology for you. So here goes.

  Set up your edit using the HDV 1080i50 presets or easy set-ups. Then close FCP. Yep, shut it down. Next, making sure your camera is switched off, connect it to your computer via firewire as usual. Then switch your camera on, and only then boot up FCP. Voila, your computer should now be in close harmony with your camera and you should have full log and capture capabilities. Nice.

  Editing:
  I’ve read some stuff about transcoding HDV to Apple Pro-Res. Not sure what other people have to say about this but I can’t really see a benefit. Stay in HDV and you get native file sizes and as far as I can tell all FX work well.

  Exporting:
  I had a bit of an issue with how things look on export – on some settings the graphics looked crisp, clean and luscious but the footage was all lineated and comby. If I then de-interlaced the footage so that was clean, the graphics would go ropey. What’s a guy to do?
  Well this apparently:
  >Export using Compressor
  >HDV1080i50

  And that’s it. Do not do anything to de-interlace it in Compressor and leave frame controls off. Play back your exported video in Quicktime and you’ll notice the graphics are great but the footage needs de-interlacing. So do this:

  Quicktime>Window>Show movie properties
  Click on video track and a dialogue box opens up with 3 boxes at the bottom right: High Quality, Single Field, and De-interlace. High Quality is checked by default, (on mine at least), so leave that on. Ignore Single Field, but check the de-interlace box.

  And by the Power of Greyskull, I have lovely, clean, de-interlaced footage and pin sharp gfx!! It’s a miracle!

  When you close the movie down it’ll ask if you want to save- yes you do.

  And that’s it. The movies compress to Flash H.264 and DVD superbly leaving you one happy camper with happy clients.

  I appreciate this might be teaching some people to suck eggs, but I hope others find it useful. And thanks to all the previous respondents on this topic who have helped point the way.

  Cheers all,

  Neil

  Neil Weaver replied 17 years, 3 months ago 1 Member · 0 Replies
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