FCP to Premiere Pro FULL CONVERT

[Charles Fasano]

Thank you to all who have added much useful information to this post. I apologize for not replying as I’ve been in the field.

I’m a formally educated marine biologist first and a self taught video man second. I remember researching video formats 10 years ago when I started filming for research and can’t believe I have to go through this again.

I’m hoping to find the happiest medium for marrying my old footage with my new footage and be able to keep my personal filing system in tact.
My current FCP organization is arranged in this manner:
-ALL project files are on my system’s drive
-all capture and render files are on an external 6TG Raid (eSata)
-I use 1 main project file (“MASTER_CLIPS”) to capture all my clips and I organize them in bins by “#date(project name or site)”
-the working projects (more of a category) is categorized by animal (ex: “octopus.fcp” or “mantas.fcp”) with clips that were copied from the “MASTER_CLIPS” project
-all sequences for that animal are in the project itself.

Can I keep this arrangement in PPro?
I saw a tutorial that states that when PPro creates a project, it also creates a folder, to hold capture/renderfiles, in the same folder as the file is placed, and names the new folder the same name as the file. This doesn’t fit my current arrangement and am wondering if there was a way to work around this? I’d like to have PPro identical to FCP.

Lastly, back to the format question, what is the best format for me to ingest my AVCHD footage into PPro and have it work seamlessly with my old footage which was captured using Apple Intermediate 1080i60? The old footage hopefully transfers flawlessly over using XML.

Again, thank you to everyone for all your help and I apologize for not have any input earlier.

Aloha:
-Charlie-