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AVCHD into Final Cut 6.0.2
I’ve been trying to import AVCHD footage from a Panasonic HS9 camcorder (an HDD consumer camcorder) into Final Cut Pro 6.0.2 running on my macbook pro– and so far, nothing has succeeded in importing the files. I can see the clips in the log and transfer window, but Final Cut crashes when I try to play them, and when I add them to the queue and hit import, the clips come through with a gray screen and audio only. Is there a codec I’m missing? Something is obviously not responding properly, but I’m a bit confused at this point as to exactly what it could be.
Help!
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13 Replies
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Have you copied all of the material off of the sd card to an external drive before import?
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Yes, I’ve made a disk image of the entire contents of the camera’s hard drive (footage was captured to the drive, not SD card). Still the same thing happens when I mount the disk image. Footage comes in audio only, with gray visuals. Seems like a codec is missing, or not working properly, but can’t figure out which one…
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[Matthew Landfield] “Yes, I’ve made a disk image of the entire contents of the camera’s hard drive”
Hmm. I know FCP doesn’t accept material off of DVD AVCHD. Not sure about hard drives, although to me that would mean just a big SD card, but who knows, maybe it means big DVD. I have only tried it once with a buddies camera and it was on an SD card and it worked great, so I am just making educated guesses here. You have gone into your log and transfer prefs and setup which codec to transcode to, right? Also, do you still have the contents on the hard drive?
Jeremy
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I’ve tried the ingest using both Apple ProRes422 and Apple Intermediate Codec using the Log and Transfer prefs, and I’ve also changed the Audio/video capture settings and the project settings to different configurations, with the same results– gray visuals, audio only. I do have the footage on the camera’s hard drive, which connects only via USB2. But I’m getting the same results with the camera and without it.
I’ve been able to test the footage a little bit using Voltaic, and it transcodes ok that way– but slow. Since Final Cut says it supports AVCHD, I’m inclined to try to get it to work if I can. -
[Matthew Landfield] “Since Final Cut says it supports AVCHD, I’m inclined to try to get it to work if I can. “
It does, just not all AVCHD. Have you downloaded and installed the P2 drivers and AVC-Intra drivers? it shouldn’t have anything to do with this, but it’s worth a shot.
Try the P2 driver and the AVC-Intra driver from this page:
https://www.panasonic.com/business/provideo/support/software_downloads.asp
Jeremy
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Yes, I have all the P2 drivers installed, and the AVC-intra drivers. As a matter of fact, until I installed another codec, the “AVC1” codec, I couldn’t see any of the footage at all, and Final cut would just crash when I tried to ingest anything. The AVC1 codec seemed to make it possible to actually see the footage, but still produced the grayed out clips that I described earlier.
I looked on Apple’s website and found a list of supported AVCHD camcorders, and the one that I have is not on that list (it’s a client’s Panasonic HS9 HDD camera). Could it be that this camera is recording the AVCHD footage to the Hard Disk in a way that is incompatible with the Final Cut codecs? -
[Matthew Landfield] “Could it be that this camera is recording the AVCHD footage to the Hard Disk in a way that is incompatible with the Final Cut codecs?”
Yes. Sorry that I don’t know much more about it, and my apologies for not pointing you in the right direction. I do know that FCP does not accept AVCHD off of DVD and perhaps this is the same format as DVD recorded material. Have you tried, dare I say, iMovie HD? At least to get the footage in?
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Heh heh. Yep. I know this is frustrating– the only thing I can think to do is to try a clean install of Final Cut on a different machine, and try it again. (I have a second machine available to me today). If that doesn’t work, I’ll throw in the towel, buy Voltaic, and send an angry email to Apple. Will post back if I find that it works.
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Just a follow up to this post–
We did try reinstalling Final Cut Pro 6.0.2 on a clean, brand-spanking-new system running OSX.4.11, and we still could not import AVCHD material from a Panasonic HS9 consumer camcorder into the system. 🙁
Used Voltaic for the transcode, which basically ran overnight for between 1-2 hours of footage.
It seems that Final Cut will support some AVCHD material, but not others.
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I think that AVCHD is only possible when you have minimum a dual-core machine.
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