[Dan Charrington]

Logging and transferring it couldn’t be easier. Just hook the camera to your Mac via USB. Once you plug the USB up, the camera will pop up with a little menu asking you which source you want to work from (either the camera’s 120gig HD or any SD card you might have in there). It can’t work from both at once I don’t think.

Once you’ve selected the HD, the camera will say it’s ready to go. Fire up FCP and choose “Log and Transfer”. All your clips should be listed in the Log and Transfer window. Choose one, mark your in and out points on the right side and any Logging info and drag it into the queue down at the bottom. (Or just drag the whole clip without IN/OUT points if you want the whole thing).

What FCP will do is transcode the AVCHD file into an Apple ProRes file that you can edit with. No problem. The transcode process is nearly a real-time process from what I’ve seen. (ie 5 minutes of footage takes 5 minutes to transcode)

The ProRes files will be saved to the capture scratch folder you have selected for your project.

As for backing up the raw AVCHD files, I imagine the camera’s HD will appear in the FINDER window of your Mac when you connect it. All you have to do is dig for the files you want. (You might have to sift through some sub-directories to find them, and the file names will probably be a pretty rudimentary numeric sequence.)

Hope that helps. I just got the same kind of camera myself (after spending eight years with nothing at home but a MiniDV camera. *shudder*) so I haven’t had much time to play with it, but I like what I’ve been able to do with it so far!

–

Dan Charrington
Supervisor, Non-Linear Technologies

MIJO
635 Queen St E. Toronto, ON
416-964-7539

MacPro 8-core Xeon 2.8GHz, 10gb Ram, AJA Kona 3 SD/HD

[Dan Charrington]

Select all the clips you want to adjusts and choose Modify>>Levels (or Command+Option+L)

You can adjust the Gain in the slider that appears. The two choices (Relative/Absolute) mean the following:

Relative: adjusts all clips relative to what they are currently set at. ie – a clip at 10db will go to 4db if you enter “-6”

Absolute: sets all clips to whatever level you enter. ie – a clip at 10db will go to -6db if you enter “-6”

Hope that helps.

–

Dan Charrington
Supervisor, Non-Linear Technologies

MIJO
635 Queen St E. Toronto, ON
416-964-7539

MacPro 8-core Xeon 2.8GHz, 10gb Ram, AJA Kona 3 SD/HD

[Dan Charrington]

Well I suppose specifically I’m asking that, say, if a Quicktime file that was created at 25 frames per second at a standard definition resolution with captioning information included in the video on line 22 (I believe that’s the standard for PAL captioning. I could be wrong) was provided, would FCP be able to output that file through an AJA Kona card into a PAL digital betacam machine and maintain the captioning.

Conversely would it be possible to digitize a PAL video signal that had captioning into Final Cut Pro and maintain the captioning information.

–

Dan Charrington
Supervisor, Non-Linear Technologies

MIJO
635 Queen St E. Toronto, ON
416-964-7539

MacPro 8-core Xeon 2.8GHz, 10gb Ram, AJA Kona 3 SD/HD

[Dan Charrington]

Thanks for the insight guys.

I’m brought back to my original question now: is there a way to determine the colorspace information of a JPEG 2000 quicktime file attained from an unknown source? (Via FCP, plug-ins or other means).

–

Dan Charrington
Supervisor, Non-Linear Technologies

MIJO
635 Queen St E. Toronto, ON
416-964-7539