A little stuck - .avi into FCP Help!

Staven

Staven

Well-known member
Scenario - Potential client wants me to do a trailer for a video game he is making.

I believe he is using a screen recording program to record video of the game.

He sent me .avi files of various codecs. One was a Compressor labelled Apple-Microsoft Video 1. Another was Xvid. Also his clips are only 10fps (apparently his machine crashes if the fps are higher)

I thought I'd be able to use Mpeg Streamclip to convert them, but the best I've been able to get it the middle of the clip goes black for several seconds for no reason. Other attempts result in failure to transcode.

I tried a different converter and it only exported them as SD when they are 1080 HD.

Not sure what I can do. Running FCP 7 on i5 iMac.
 
1. Did you try dropping them straight into FCP?
2. How about QT export conversion?
3. You might need to get someone with a PC system, Adobe or Pinnacle Studio to convert them for you.
 
Thanks for the reply.

1. In FCP I can view them in the viewer. But the .avi's do not work in the timeline. They say unrendered and rendering just stops says error. No settings have the same compressor as the compressor used on the .avi

2. Yes, tried various ways and methods, nothing ends up creating a successful clip.

3. Are you suggesting someone with say Premiere could export the .avi files as a more friendly FCP codec??
 
So, turned out downloading DIVX Player for Mac allowed me to view the Xvid.avi files.

Then I was able to save them as h.264's, and use in FCP. But I'm thinking of transcoding the h.264's into ProRes just to make an easier edit (huge size difference though), and because resized images hold up better as ProRes.
 
Best to go with ProRes -- H264 is a delivery codec not meant for editing.

If at all possible transcode directly from the AVI files to ProRes instead of using the H264 files. That should give you better quality.

Try opening the AVI files in QT Pro and go to the file menu and simply hit Save - make it a self-contained file. That should give you a .mov playable on a Mac (and thus transcodable).
 
With Flip for Mac you can export the .avi's directly as .mov ProRes from Quicktime. You never want to edit with h264 because its a long gop format which will cause insane render times and no real time playback.
 
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