Importing MiniDV tapes

[Craig Seeman]

[James Taylor] “Audio #1”
[James Taylor] “Channel(s) : 4 channels
Sampling rate : 32.0 KHz
Bit depth : 16 bits”

This seems odd. While it’s possible for it to be 4 channels as that was one of features of 32kHz audio function, that it’s 16 bits is odd. If you look at your other audio, they’re 12 bit as 32kHz should be.

Are these from 3 different clips. Are all of them silent in Quicktime? Might you be monitoring silent channels in most players but FCPX sees all of them?

[James Taylor]

Craig,

I”m at a complete loss. That was the info for one clip. All I did was plug in my Canon Elura50 to grab some old home movies my wife took of the kids. I opened FCPX and went to import from camera. It recognized the camera so I clicked import. There really weren’t many options to choose from, I didn’t see an option to choose what kind of audio. I imported the entire tape and everything played fine in FPCX. I happened to open a clip later in QT and noticed there was no audio. I did try to capture another tape and I selected the remove silent audio channels, but that didn’t seem to make a difference. I guess it’s not such a big deal, but I may not do anything with the footage for awhile and I may end up using a different program then FCPX. I just wanted to make sure I wouldn’t have to re-import everything later because it worn’t work in another program (won’t have a way to import tapes later as I”m giving the video camera away to someone that needs it). The clips seem to open fine in AECS5, so worst case I would have to take everything through there at a later date. It just seems weird that FCPX brings it in as such a weird setting?

Thanks,

JT

[Craig Seeman]

I suspect other playback programs are defaulting to silent channels or maybe the 16bit 32kHz is causing an issue.

Try one more thing, Open the clip in Quicktime 7 Pro and use Window Show Movie Properties (not Inspector) and see what it says. It may tell you how many tracks there are any you may be able to uncheck the empty channels. That would probably alter the metadata so you’d need to reimport into FCXP again.

Also in QuickTime 7 Pro (not X) try capturing the same tape clip and see what happens.
That will tell you if there’s a difference between the way FCXP captures ad QT7.

[James Taylor]

Craig,

I actually don’t have QT7pro. I assume it doesn’t come with FCPX? Is there another way to do this?

JT

[Fred Waycoot]

Hi James, are the specs you listed what you were expecting? (meaning, is the footage you were capturing supposed to be DV, 32khz, etc?)
Are you capturing from a camera, or deck… and what type? What are the specs of your mac? Maybe I can figure this out…

-Fred Waycoot
Editor/Colorist/Filmmaking Guy

[James Taylor]

Thanks Fred,

To be honest, I just wanted to capture my footage from my MiniDV tapes before I donate the camera. Most of the footage is home movies of the kids my wife shot. I just want good quality footage that I can edit sometime down the road.

I’m capturing the footage form a Canon Elura 50 (all the tapes where captured with this camera). FCPX recognizes the camera fine. I just want to capture it and then store it on an external drive. Not many choices with FCPX on how to do this. I assume it’s capturing it as ProRes 422? Kind of overkill, but I figure FCPX will convert it to that anyways when I get around to editing it.

The footage comes out fine, and I can certainly edit it in FCPX. The problem is that I happened to try and open A clip in QTime and there was no audio. That doesn’t really matter too much, except that I started wondering what would happen if I decided to move to another editing software – will the footage be compatible? I don’t want to spend a lot of time capturing the footage and then have to do it all over again (if I even can as I won’t have the camera). I did try opening the footage in AECS5 and was able to get audio. So, worst case I would probably have to convert all the footage if I used something besides FCPX to edit later on.

I have a new (8 weeks old) 15″ Macbook Pro – this should be fine I would assume? 7200 RPM drive and 8 gigs of ram. 2.2 GHz Core i7.

Thanks for any help!

James

JT

[Fred Waycoot]

My guess is that since you are using an Elura50 that you may have had it set to some “a-typical” settings when the footage was shot. FCPX must have the codec for your settings cause it plays back, but it sounds like quicktime doesn’t… have you performed a software update for quicktime recently? If you can find the proapps QuickTime codecs update, that might allow for quicktime playback.
Another option, since you may have shot your footage with settings that might trip up many systems… you could export quicktime movies of your footage from fcpx. That way, moving forward, your archived footage should be fine for playback and importing to future NLE’s.
Sorry I couldn’t be or more help! Good luck.

-Fred Waycoot
Editor/Colorist/Filmmaking Guy