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Importing Canon 5DMk3 Footage is Baffling Me
I am migrating over to FCPX and something has be baffled.
I have been shooting pretty much exclusively with DSLR’s these days. In FCP 7 when I imported footage off the card from my 7D I had a very simple workflow.
Using the EOS plug in…
First make a Disk Image of the card and archive that on a couple of drives.
Then setting the I/O for my selects from each shot and ignoring the garbage shots.
Then import only the good stuff into FCP.
Easy…I have protection for everything as disk images and have only imported what I want on my working drives.I need some help understanding the process in FCPX. I watched Steve Martin’s great tutorial but I remain confused.
I have imported lots of footage off the cards from the 7D and now 5DMk3 but I imported the footage in using the “Import Files” command…which means I have to import everything…good and bad…off the card. So I have every single shot on the card in FCP whether I want/need them or not.
That, based on past experience, sucks. I know that the event is in fact nothing more than an archive similar to what I did archiving the whole card as a .dmg for protection in FCP 7 but in FCPX I have all that crap footage (which we all have) that I don’t want in FCPX. I know I can disappear it out of the events panel but that’s not the point…it’s still there taking up space or I guess I can go lose it manually but who needs that drill.
I know there are format issues relative to the Canon footage being QT already and that drives how it must be imported but, and here is the real question for this post…Why can’t I use the import from camera command so I can simulate the easy life I had using the EOS plug in in FCP 7 and only import what I want.
Am I missing something here? Is there a workflow for FCPX where I can only import selects and be able to use the archive function built into FCPX?
Thanks in advance.
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4 Replies
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Hello Lucky,
From the FCPX Manual:
Import media from an archive or disk image
1 In Final Cut Pro, choose File > Import from Camera.
The Camera Import window appears, showing all camera archives in the Camera Archives section on the left. You can preview the media by either playing it using the playback controls or skimming it by moving the pointer forward or backward over a filmstrip. You can also change which archive to import from and change the way the clips appear using the controls at the bottom-right corner of the window.
2 Do one of the following:
• Under the list of Camera Archives on the left, select the archive you want to import.
• Click Open Archive, navigate to the folder of the archive you want to import, and click Open.3 To select which clips you want to import, do one of the following:
• To import all clips: Click Import All.
• To import only some of the clips: Select each clip you want to import by Command-clicking each thumbnail, or dragging to select a group of clips, and click Import Selected.• To import a portion of one clip: Drag inside the clip to select the range that you want to import, and click Import Selected.
Tip: You can also select a clip, press the Space bar to play the clip, and press either I to set a start point or O to set an end point.
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One bug I noticed is that if you have any still images taken on that card ‘import from camera’ will not work. Since in order to do custom white balance on Canon cameras you have to take a still picture, it makes it hard.
The way around this is to delete ALL still pictures BEFORE you use FCPX. If you want to keep them, you’ll have to manually copy them first, then delete them from the card.
FCPX needs to improve its camera import function.
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Also, you can import the native h264 media in X as opposed to transcoding every frame in fcp7.
You can choose to transcode later if you want.
Once the footage is in fcpx has excellent logging features for which to organize your footage, including options to “hide rejected” footage. You can even reject parts of clips and keep the “good” parts.
It works vey differently from fcp7, so I’d suggest reading up on X’s features, or perhaps check out some training.
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Thanks for all the input…importing works fine now. I have no idea why it did not before as I followed the normal procedure. Works now so thanks.
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