-
Importing XL-H1 as “clips” into FCPX
I have someone who shoots for me on an older Canon XL-H1 and we continually have issues importing his tapes for our editing process. For some reason FCPX will not capture his tapes as “clips,” creating a new clip each time the camera record starts/stops. Every time we capture his tapes we get one long solid hour clip. We have production standards for our Post Team that require footage to be captured as clips. My shooter cannot for the life of him figure out what the issue is.
We are running the standard importing procedure on FCPX which by default only captures tapes as clips. I am assuming it has to do with a record setting in camera since the software end/capturing is pretty standard.
Does anyone have any experience with the XL-H1 and this problem? We are pretty much at our wits end dealing with this and the shooter is not technically helpful enough to fix the problem on his end.
-
2 Replies
-
[Stephen Reese] “My shooter cannot for the life of him figure out what the issue is.”
Your shooter is not doing anything wrong, and there’s nothing for him to figure out. The XLH1, like virtually every tape-based camera, doesn’t divide shots in to “clips” no matter how often you start and stop the camera. It is what it is, continuous tape.
Now personally I didn’t do this very often, but some NLEs will allow you to capture tape as clips. All of our suites are Premiere (CS6) and we don’t use FCP at all, so I really can’t speak of those capabilities. Premiere however will allow you to “scene detect” when capturing from tape will does break the captured footage into clips. I never touch Final Cut so I couldn’t say if FCPX has such a feature. You say FCPX “by default only captures tapes as clips.” That likely is the default setting, but is there a “non-default” setting that will allow you to do that? If so, easy breezy.
If not, the only other option really capture the tape, throw the footage on a timeline, and then export new individual clips as needed for your post team.
T2
__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
-
Thanks for the response Todd. This one definitely throws us for a loop since all other tape based footage will import as “clips” for us. With FCPX the only importing process is to break the capture into clips, you have to actually go through a separate workflow to capture tapes as solid “bricks.” The problem unfortunately boils down to just this one shooter working with the XL-H1. We do have a software that will detect scene changes and automatically break it into clips, unfortunately that is a long multi stepped process and it would be much better to just import the tape as clips from the start. Also just to be clear, we have tried to import the tapes on alternate software (FCP7 and Premiere).
I was really just curious if there was some sort of capture setting in camera or something that would cause the tapes to be captured this way. Looks like we may be out of luck though.
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up