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those nifty little ACVHD cameras – editing on FCP?
Hi all,
sorry if this has been posted before.
I was looking around vimeo and saw some pretty stunning footage shot on some little HD video cameras. I’m itching to buy one (can’t quite afford a professional DV camera) and for what they’re worth, the portability is a dream…
Read somewhere that editing with AVCHD on FCP is a pain, or problematic, wondering if anyone could share their experiences? I have FCP version 5, is it true that AVCHD works best with FCP 6? Must I absolutely upgrade? Also, what sequence settings are there for the mp4 format, since it seems to be the format that the cameras record in?
Thanks in advance! It would help me spend my hard-earned $ less hastily…
-lee
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3 Replies
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My understanding is that w/ FCP 6, it converts AVCHD into Pro-Res, so transfering (or capurting) footage takes a little longer than real time b/c it has to transcode the footage to a different file type.
I don’t know all the specs off hand for FCS 1, but I’m guessing you should be able to find somewhere online raw clips right off the card that someone shot w/ an AVCHD camera. Download those clips and see if you can get them into FCP 5, you might have to go through compressor or something like MPEG StreamClip, but once it is in a format that FCP can use, you’re all set.
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I have one of those little AVCHD cammies. It is a Canon HF10. I love it because I can carry it in my backpack and I even got a nice little gorillapod and rode videomic for it. It sucks because of it’s lack of manual control. Anyways, pic looks great on a HD tv and everywhere else BUT Quicktime cannot even play the files back.
You must ingest them into FCP with the ProRes 422 codec which isn’t bad EXCEPT for the fact that now you are left with the original file PLUS a file that is 4 times the size of the original!!!
Talk about eating up some disk space!! Now, I bought it knowing full well that was the case AND in hopes that Apple would eventually offer native support for this. I see no reason why an 8 core Mac shouldn’t be able to handle this with ease.
Right now FCP can’t use all the power it has available. Snow Leopard is our only hope 🙂
So, if you buy one just know that you will essentially be needing 100Mbit/per second of space to effectively edit your video UNTIL Apple fixes FCP.
Cheers,
Elijah
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Wow that’s a lot of space. I don’t even have FCP 6. Also, I’d really like one that shoots in 25fps…
I think I’ll just hold off on AVCHD and stick to good ol’ tape for now…
Thanks for the feedback Elijah!
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