[Joe Bender]

Hi Jon,
The native format of the XH-A1 is HDV, so you can either capture straight into HDV or capture and transcode to a higher quality format like ProRes 422 HQ. The advantage of that is that the rest of your workflow will then be in ProRes, so your color correction and any graphics effects will be in a les compressed format with a better color space. On the other hand, your storage space requirements are increased enormously. Since you’re in the field I’m guessing your storage isn’t unlimited, and you can always transcode to ProRes later, so your best bet is probably to capture to HDV.

To set up FCP to capture HDV, in your Audi/Video Settings set your sequence preset to match your camera settings, capture preset to “HDV” and device control preset to “HDV FireWire.” If you want to capture the HDV straight to Apple Intermediate Codec, ProRes 422, or ProRes 422 HQ, choose “HDV-ProRes 422 HQ” or equivalent for your capture preset. Once you select those settings you may need to disconnect/reconnect your camera, or disconnect your camera and restart FCP. Now you should be able to open the Log and Capture window and either batch capture or use capture now. I usually use capture now and log from the whole tape, although some people report sync problems when using capture now for long clips. That’s never been an issue for me with this camera.

Hope that helps, and good luck!

Joe

[Joe Bender]

Thanks everybody for your responses. The project is about 100 hours of HDV footage, edited in ProRes 422 HQ, with some additional footage and audio material and way too many sequences.

I’m trying to achieve a workable situation for the project, which has gotten so bloated that FCP crashes all the time. After realizing that my project file size is the problem, I’ve tried to copy the most necessary content into a new project (or several), but when I try to copy any content FCP hangs (beach ball of death) and crashes. I thought that by deleting some of the material from a copy of the project I could shrink the project file down enough that FCP would run properly and I could reorganize the project into several FCP project files. That’s where the strangeness comes up. I thought I could delete a bunch of old sequences and cut the file size down, but no matter how much content I remove from the project, the file stays the same size (or in a tight range).

Not sure if that sheds any further light on the problem, but there you have it.

Thanks again,

Joe

[Joe Bender]

@Andreas

Apologies for the multiple post, I redownloaded TEP and think I figured out the workflow, but I can’t test it because TEP won’t let me export as an XML file. Is this a limitation of the non-registered version? If so, is there any way I can test the XML export without buying?

Thanks again!

Joe

[Joe Bender]

@Andreas

I have a 60-min video in Russian and Kazakh subbed in English, with the subs timed manually in FCP, and need to change the font/size/position. I know that in principle I can export as an XML, strip the titles in TitleExchange, and reimport into FCP using a new template. However, I tried it with the demo version before deciding whether to buy TEP and couldn’t get it to work. Can you lay out the workflow for me or point me to step-by-step instructions?

Thanks!

Joe

[Joe Bender]

@Jackie

I have a video for which I’ve manually made subs with a text generator in FCP, but need to change the format of all the titles. I know that in principle I should be able to export the timeline as XML, strip the titles from their video track, and reimport using a new template, but I haven’t been able to make it work. When I tried this earlier on in the project I was using the demo version of TitleExchange before deciding whether to buy or not. Do you know if it’s possible to use TEP to strip a track of titles from a sequence XML and reimport using a new generator? If so, can you lay out the workflow for me?

Thanks!

Joe