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FCP export to work in Avid
Hi. I have a feature that was shot on the HVX… in 1080 24PA. The editing process went smoothly through FCP. We got in to a film fest and they are asking for delivery on HDCAM.
So, I was advised to export a 10 bit uncompressed Quicktime and bring it to my HD suite… which is an Avid Symphony. The post house is generous enough to let me work for free as long as I do all the work… so they can not provide me with tech advice.
I was wondering if this uncompressed QT is going to work on the Avid. Any advice would be greatly appreciated being that time is now an issue.. I don’t have time to experiment.
Thanks so much.
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9 Replies
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Sure if it’s Avid on a Mac- it’s QuickTime based. On a PC a bit more tricky with os concerns but still doable.
Noah
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The Avids I’ll be using are all PC. Any suggestions with this?
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Avid on a PC is identical to Avid on a Mac. The issue will be taking your uncompressed quicktime and getting it to the PC, because the file will likely be huge.
If you can compress your movie from FCP to a quicktime in one of Avid’s DNxHD codecs–Avid’s ProRes–the import will be faster on the Avid side and the file will be smaller. You can download the Avid codecs from the Avid site.
Otherwise, you’ll have to find a way to get the file to an external drive that the PC can read. If they have a Mac on an internal network you can just export to an external drive, copy it to their Mac, then transfer it to the PC. Otherwise they’ll need MacDrive or Paragon so the PC can read the Mac formatted harddrive. They probably won’t like you installing software on their edit systems though.
You could format an external as Fat32, which can read and written on Mac and PCs, but there’s a file size limit. It’s either 2GB or 4GB, so you’ll need to export your movie from FCP in chunks, then import them into Avid and lay them back to back in the timeline.
If you run into Avid specific problems, pop over to the Avid forum here on the Cow and we’ll help you there.
Otherwise, good luck! This shouldn’t be a problem at all once you figure out how you’ll get the Quicktime onto the PC.
Michael.
PS. If you can write your final movie back to a P2 card you can probably use that to import it into the Avid. Is that a possibility?
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Thanks.. but I looked in to the codec and the avid page reads “Exporting from a non-Avid product: Export using this codec at a size of 720 x 486 (D1 NTSC) or 720 x 576 (D1 PAL), otherwise the export fails.”
So that defeats the use of 1080, right?
As far as dumping to a P2, can’t do. No longer have that equipment.
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You were looking at an SD codec–I’m willing to bet it was the Meridien codec, which does fail at any image size other than then standard NSTC or PAL broadcast size.
You would want to export with the DNxHD codec or Avid 1:1x. Read about DNxHD here:
https://www.avid.com/dnxhd/index.asp
Download all Avid codecs here:
If you scroll a little past half way down the page you’ll see the bits about 1:1x, then DNxHD.
If you don’t have much time, go with uncompressed. You’ll wait longer to import it into Avid and you’ll have a bigger file size, but it might be easier since you seem to be on a tight deadline.
Michael.
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Just curious, why are you going to Avid?
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Got the codec. Hopefully this works…. Thanks so much for your help.
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A few reasons… I am familiar with Avid’s color correction. Also, I don’t have the means to dump to tape from my Final Cut.
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[sean baker] “A few reasons… I am familiar with Avid’s color correction”
Fair Enough.
[sean baker] “Also, I don’t have the means to dump to tape from my Final Cut.”
As long as you have a firewire port on your computer, you do.
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