[Billy Alberto]

Thanks Tom,

Ok here goes:

The Canon Vixia has four modes: FXP, XP+, SP and LP. I usually record on FXP or XP+ depending on how great I want the picture. Most of the time it’s XP+. Sometimes SP if I have something I want to get that’s not important enough to have a high def picture.

As for the picture once I download the camera into FCP, in the viewer, they all look the same in terms of size and dimensions of the picture. Just different in how grainy or clear they look. As far as I can tell, the Canon Vixia doesn’t let me choose picture size. It’s just a standard rectangle.

I import the files via the “Log and Transfer” option, which seems to be the only one that works for taking the mts files off of the Vixia’s hard drive. Log and Transfer brings up a box that has all of the clips listed, and then it tells me to drag and drop them into the box below, which then transfers it into the Browser window.

I will mention that while this is going on, what amounts to about 4 or so gigs of files on the actual camera, eats up about 75-100 gigs of space on my hard drive. Not sure why that is. But I know that’s a separate issue.

Once I have the clips into the browser, I pull down the ones that I need. For instance, I’m holding auditions for something now, and want to make a separate QT movie for each actor’s audition. So I drag their individual audition clips down to the Timeline Sequence. They don’t need rendering, because I’m basically converting them to QT as is. If I get fancy with it and do any editing, then I will, of course, render them prior to converting.

I choose the in and out points. Then I click on “Export Using Quicktime Conversion”. I read that this is the right option for basically burning archives to a DVD that I can be watched on a DVD player, watched on a computer – or in some cases, uploaded to a large file server where the actors can download their own auditions for reference. From what I read, the “create QT movie” option is only for creating files that will be used to edit in FCP or similar program, but not for watching.

Then the pop up box comes up and if I just let it do the conversion and create the file with the standard settings, I get the squished picture. The options that I mentioned in my original post, I chose because I had spent hours reading on the internet about what to choose for settings and file size, etc. And the NTSC 3:4, NTSC 16:9 (there are two options each – I think 480 and 486? Can’t remember), was mentioned because I’m in the U.S. and NTSC is the standard here. I tried a few of the other preset settings and got the same squished picture unless I clicked on “retain aspect ratio” and then letterbox.

I’d prefer not to have letterbox if possible – and like I said in my original posting, one of the settings I found on the internet did work and gave me a movie file that was a decent size (around 100 megs), looked good and wasn’t squished or cropped (at least not noticeably). My mistake for not immediately writing that setting down. But it’s been SO much trial and error – and it takes roughly two hours to convert a 10 minute movie into QT with the settings I’ve been trying.

Ultimately, I do want a nice quality and not a Youtube grainy quality. The Vixia is already not great with low light, so I’d rather not diminish the quality even further.

I hope that helps.

One last thing I’ll mention – is that I’ve used the official Apple Pro Training books to learn FCP, and I’ve found them wonderful and that they’ve given me enough specific information to play around with editing and make a decently edited project. But for the current situation, I’m not even editing. Just taking 4 or 5 clips of an actor’s audition and piecing them together so I can review them later with my casting crew.

Also, I’ve found that the mts files created by the Vixia MUST be transferred directly from the camera onto FCP. When I’ve copied them to a drive and tried to pull them into FCP, FCP doesn’t recognize the files. So as far as I can tell (from a LOT of reading about it on the internet), “Log and Transfer” is the only way to get the files directly into FCP. Otherwise, I have to use a conversion program with the raw MTS files, which degenerates the quality and takes a LOT of time to convert.

Thanks again for your help! SO nice of you to help a newbie! I know we’re an annoying bunch – and that a lot of “us” will post questions without doing our due diligence. I promise you that I use this as a last resort if I can’t find answers after a LOT of reading on the internet and the message boards.

Unfortunately, I know the answers are out there, and I may have even read them, but they’re so technically oriented, that they read to me as if they’re in Chinese. I like to joke that “I would happily use the gizinkdadoint feature, if I had any idea what a gaizinkdadoint is and where to find it” haha.

iMac OSX 10.6.2
3.06 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
4 GB 1067 MHz RAM
Final Cut Pro 7.0

[Billy Alberto]

I’m having a similar problem.

I’ll mention that I recently upgraded from OSX 10.3 to OSX 10.5. I couldn’t start FCP prior to the upgrade (which had run for a year with no problems), and had the same error message after the new OSX was installed. I have not repaired disk permissions yet, as I assumed that putting a new OSX would start everything fresh again?

Anyway, I tried to reinstall FCP, but I got the same error message again. So I ran a program that someone gave me that supposedly took every FCP component off of my computer, so that I could do a clean fresh install. This time I did get the registration screen, but when it tried to load FCP, it’s as if the old version of the program were still on there – and I AGAIN got the error in trying to open the program.

As a little test, I went through the whole process again and changed the spelling on my registration name, but when FCP tried to load, the pop up box for FCP still had the old registration spelling from the original install – even though I had done what I thought was a clean install.

Any suggestions?