[John Christie]

Hi Alf

I edit at home on a 3.06Ghz Imac with 6GB RAM. It’s about a year and a half old. I keep all my media on a striped FW 800 drive, and back up my cards to a USB hard drive as well. The majority of my work is 720P and the computer handles it beautifully. I don’t do a lot of effects, other than smooth cam and some titles, so rendering never seems to bog me down.

The beauty of the FCP/AVCHD workflow is that once you’ve transcoded to ProRes, there’s not a lot of heavy lifting for the computer to do. You can batch all the transcoding as well, so you don’t have to be sitting in front of the computer while it’s going on. Transcoding a 1 min clip takes roughly 25 seconds.

The only thing I don’t like with the iMac is the lack of expansion. My day job is managing a department of 12 edit suites, all Mac Pros with fibre channel cards running off of XSAN, and I love how easy it is to get inside them and swap hard drives, video IO etc. I do a lot of H.264 work at home, and I’ve just ordered a Matrox MXO2 with Max compression to help with that. But I’ll have to put that on my 17″ Macbook Pro as it has a 34 card slot.

Cheers

John C

[John Christie]

Hi Isaac

Read the answer to your other post about re-capturing from AVCHD, it all works properly as it should.

Don’t use Prores LT as a final codec, it’s designed for offline editing. You can import everything as LT for space reasons, and then media manage and recapture your final timeline as Prores or Prores HQ. You won’t notice a huge difference between the two unless you’re doing a lot of graphics work.

You don’t want to be transcoding and changing frame sizes and frame rates, things will get ugly real fast. Pick a frame size/rate that fits your needs and stick with it. I like 720P as I can shoot 24P or choose to shoot 60P for nice slo-mo footage. But that’s my choice.

Cheers

John C

[John Christie]

Hi Isaac

I did a quick test, loaded a few shots from AVCHD as Prores (regular) and cut them into a timeline. Then I media managed the sequence to create an offline sequence with handles as Prores HQ. I opened log and transfer and changed the preferences to transcode as Prores HQ , then I selected the offline sequence and asked it to batch capture. The clips all transferred and transcoded properly to HQ with handles.

So if FCP can do all that, I don’t know why it would have any issues in recapturing offline clips from the original AVCHD files.

You also asked about converting files with some other software. I wouldn’t do that as FCP wouldn’t know how those files were made. IF FCP can do all this by itself, there’s no reason to use other software.

Also, regarding codecs for FCP, your best off to stick with Prores. It’s optimized to work well with FCP on just about any mac FCP can run on. AIC is what iMovie uses and isn’t nearly as good as Prores. AVCintra is a great codec, superior to P2 which it’s designed to replace, but I’d still stick with Prores for the ease of playback on FCP.

One caveat, I copy the cards to an external USB drive as backup. The folder name that the card files are copied into becomes the reel name. So the folder MYVIDEO with the PRIVATE folder from the SDHC card copied into it becomes reel MYVIDEO in FCP. I’m not sure if FCP needs this info to re-capture or not, but it’s a good file management practice with AVCHD to copy all the files to a hard drive before importing to FCP.

Hope this answers all your questions. One of the things I love about My HMC 150 is that my capture VTR is a $10 card reader and my HD screening machine is a Playstation 3. I’m not sure about the new PS3 thin model, but the older one I have has an SD slot and plays back AVCHD cards beautifully. You can also convert h.264 files to play on PS3, so I can have all my finished projects on my PS3 as well, but i’m going a little off topic here.

Happy New Year.

John C

[John Christie]

Hi Isaac

Haven’t done my definitive capture and re-capture test yet. But I can assure you that the Prores files do contain the timecode from the original AVCHD files. Panasonic wouldn’t be able to sell a semi-pro system with out timecode.

I’ve aso used a small Sony handicam type AVCHD camera. That camera didn’t have timecode that followed through to FCP. Every clip started at 00. So maybe that’s where you’re getting conflicting info from. Not all AVCHD has timecode.

Cheers

John C

[John Christie]

Hi Isaac

I’ll do a test tomorrow and get back to you.

Nothing wrong with the HVX 170 route either (except for the pricey cards!)

Cheers

John C

[John Christie]

Isaac

Yes, you can do the workflow you’ve described. But once you’ve finished your edit, it’s easier to media manage your project to an external drive and keep just the media you’ve used as a backup. Then you can just reopen the media managed project any time. You’ll also want to keep copies of the original SDHC cards as well. Make sure you copy the whole file structure from the cards.

You can’t use a capture card with an HMC150 as there is no external machine control. You can run HDMI out from the camera, but there’s no timecode available.

Contrary to what Dave says, you are not cheaping out. These are the workflows we’ll all be using as tape based recording systems start to become obsolete. A capture card is good to have for insuring proper outputs to monitors and video decks, but they’re not used for capturing media from AVCHD, Sony SxS or P2 cards.

Cheers

John Christie

[John Christie]

Its not really a cheat, shoot at 720 60 P, import as usual into Final Cut. Then open the files in Cinema Tools and convert the video to 24fps.

It also helps to shoot the rest of your video at 24fps and edit in a 24fps timeline to get the maximum amount of slo-mo. If you use a 60P timeline, I don’t think the clips will play back in slo-mo.

Cheers

John Christie

[John Christie]

The world is rapidly changing to HD. I wouldn’t buy a used SD camera no matter how good a deal it was. Save up a few more dollars and buy an HD camera. In 2 years you’ll be glad you did.

Cheers

John Christie

[John Christie]

That’s definately not smpte time code. Time code is eight digits in hhmmssff and eight digits of user bits which not very many people use. Ask your composer for more details

[John Christie]

Great video. But I don’t see any compositing at all, just two scenes cleverly cut together. It’s hard to scroll through a Youtube clip, but even the pan at :57 seconds looks like a cut or fast dissolve.

But maybe I’m just saying this to stay on Santa’s “nice” list

Cheers

John Christie