[Fraser Walker]

Wow. That has just solved all of my issues.

Very well done! And thanks for the added info. That’ll save me coming back with more problems later!

Really appreciate it.

[Fraser Walker]

AME = Media Encoder, right?

I just found the ‘Area Of Interest’ tool in After Effects, too. It let’s me do exactly what I explained. I think I’d feel more comfortable with Media Encoder, though. It’s loading up right now! Thanks Jeff!

[Fraser Walker]

Thanks for the quick reply!

So, basically there’s no cheat code or short-cut, it’s just about being mega organised straight out of the gate?

It’s pretty annoying, I guess. But I just tried a test and, frankly, I’m over the moon about being able to cut the native XDCAM EX footage. The time wasted in XDCAM Transfer then transcoding to ProRes was ridiculous! So being forced to be that much more organised with my footage is a small price to pay for cutting out two hugely time consuming steps of the process!

Hopefully that archiving workflow won’t cause either of us any issues. Best of luck!

[Fraser Walker]

Hi Ben,

Can I ask, did you ever find a workflow that worked for you? I’m just about to embark on a project exactly as you have described here! I just completed a job for broadcast editing a mash of 5D, 7D and 600D footage on CS6 and was delighted at how fast and smooth everything went, but now I’m about to start on the EX1 with it’s BPAV file structure. I’m mucking around with it now before tomorrow’s shoot (the shoot is a conference that runs over 3 days, so I’ll be hitting that same media management speedbump you mentioned.)

Hope all is well!
Fraser

[Fraser Walker]

So… I figured it out.

In the second attempt, the first bit of footage I had dropped in was my After Effects export with the Animation codec. So my timeline adjusted its settings accordingly, and then everything was rendering and exporting with an Animation codec.

I’m answering my own question just in case anyone else ends up in a similar situation 😉

[Fraser Walker]

Hi Kai,

This has been discussed already in other CreativeCOW forums – https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/8/1086075

It seems that the answer you’re looking for is MPEG Streamclip. It’s a free downloadable and hugely popular video conversion program. Use it to convert your .M2V’s to PreRes 422 and Final Cut will be happy to accept them.

MPEG Streamclip download – https://www.squared5.com/svideo/mpeg-streamclip-mac.html

[Fraser Walker]

Hi Stacy.

I work with EX1 footage all the time and I always convert it before I import to FCP. Use MPEG Streamclip to convert it to ProRes 422 before you start cutting it. The converted files will be much larger than your original EX1 footage, so be sure to have plenty of disk space in your target drive!

I haven’t noticed a difference in render time, as such (but it has been a long time since I cut raw EX1 clips) but I do know that ProRes doesn’t need to be rendered half as much as the EX1.

Give it a go and post your findings/review of the differences.

Good luck!