• Apple Final Cut Pro Legacy

  Best shooting file type for FCP7 considering 5 hour finished product. Quality not as important as fastest workflow.

  Posted by Tom Buchbinder on July 4, 2014 at 5:28 pm

  Hi,

  I’m faced with a project where I will be shooting about 5 1/2 hours of footage in a day, need to make minor edits, and then compress the 5 hour edited version to a flash drive. Since it’s for just documenting purposes, the video doesn’t need to be at the highest quality. I’ve been told 1280 x 720 is fine.

  I will be doing this 40 times over the next 3 months so I’m trying to streamline the process.

  What’s the most efficient workflow? I’d love to avoid some sort of file conversion to get the footage into FCP as it will be over 5 hours of footage each time.

  I was thinking about an Atomos or some portable device that records right to prores but I don’t want to carry that around since much of the 5 1/2 hours of shooting is handheld.

  Also, what’s the quickest way and best file type to take a 5 hour video and compress for viewing on both a mac and PC?

  Thanks for any guidance!

  Tom

  Tom Buchbinder replied 12 years, 2 months ago 2 Members · 2 Replies
• 2 Replies

• 

  Shane Ross

  July 4, 2014 at 6:20 pm

  If speed if your goal…then either don’t edit with FCP, or use a device that can record to an FCP codec. It’ll have to be a large one to get 5.5 hours of ProRes on it.

  For fastest editing, Premiere Pro will edit native, as will FCX…so you might need to give them a look. Both have 30 day demos.

  Best file type? H.264 MP4 file.

  Shane
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• 

  Tom Buchbinder

  July 5, 2014 at 2:59 pm

  Thanks for the help Shane.

  Tomorrow I’m going to visit a guy who says he records with a simple consumer handycam that records on SD cards (must be Class 10) that goes into FCP 7 with no transcoding. Does that sound possible?

  Regardless I think I need to upgrade even if just to make the 5 hour H.264 MP4 file and/or 5 hour .wmv file at the end. Right now I work mostly on a 2009 macbook pro.

  Trying to decide between a new fast PC with Adobe Premier CS6 or a new (expensive) power mac running Premier CS6 or FCP X.

  Any thoughts there?

  Thanks again for any help out there!

  Tom

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