Working With A PDF in FCP

[Andy Mees]

I think importing each page as separate elements, as you suggest yourself, would be the best idea … as far as I know there is currently no fancy method of handling multipage pdf’s within FCP and I fear that such a fluffy feature is just the sort of thing the FCP devs would happily waste their time on … so please keep it quiet 🙂

[Max Frank]

Ok,

Thanks, Mums the word.pdf

😉

Yours,

Wayne

[Craig Anderson]

I’ve had mixed success with PDF’s in Final Cut – they usually bog my system down.

But check out this handy dandy automator action, that extracts each page of a PDF to a separate jpeg.

https://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/automator/pdfpageextractor.html

Then you can just import all the converted files and edit away.

Craig

[Max Frank]

Craig,

This app is awesome – thank you SOOO much!!!!

It’s going to be a VERY big help.

Wayne

[Navarro Parker]

I would suggest always working with uncompressed file form. JPEG is lousy at compressing documents with text.

If you open your PDF in Preview.app and do a “save as…”, you can select any file format Quicktime supports — like PNG and TIFF — and it’ll save your pages as a bitmap that FCP can read.

If you have Illustrator, you can import PDFs and export them as PNGs or TIFF which are both lossless.