A1/Final Cut - Capture in HD? Help?

John Scott 3

John Scott 3

Well-known member
Hey All. I want to say thanks up front for any information that may be tossed my way. I'm working with a Canon XHA1 and Final Cut 5.1.4 and I CAN'T seem to capture in HD. Whenever I hook my A1 up to my computer, Final Cut doesn't recognize the camera unless I down-convert, which I DON'T want to do. I've got a TON of options in the capture settings and I feel like I've spent FOR---EVER testing all of them and can't seem to capture HD footage that isn't down-converted. Can anyone help me? I'm really going out of my mind here. I've searched the forums and found problems like this but most of them dealt with bad firewire cables. Mine's perfectly fine. Please help. PLEASE. It's my last obstacle.
 
You know what, I found it. Sorry. I don't know how to delete these threads once started, so I figure I'll take this time to tell anyone that doesn't know...how to do it.
Summary: Use Easy Setup
1. Go to the Final Cut Pro dropdown
2. Find and click on Easy Setup
3. Pick Apple Intermediate Codec 1080i50 (correct me if I'm wrong here, but this did work for me. If something else captures better footage, please let me know...I just tried this first and it worked like a champ).
4. Log and Caputre (from File dropdown) and have a great time.

This saves you the image quality sacrifice when downcoverting. I think. If I'm wrong, please let me know.
 
108024p is another setting you can use instead of the 1080i50, differnt frame rate when editing is the differnce.
 
You may have the signal standard playing incorrectly into FCP. You also might have downconversion inadvertently activated.

Go to the menu button/signal setup. Make sure it says "Auto" or HDV. Also, for downconversion disabling, you need to make sure you don't have the camera plugged-in to a computer via firewire--and then select "downconversion off".

From there, if you're a PAL user, select HDV 1080 25p Easy Setup for a 25p HDV timeline. Choose HDV 1080 50i for normal interlace HDV. If you have a mix of the two on a tape, you can capture 1080 25F and 1080 50i with the normal HDV 1080 50i setup.

If you're an NTSC user, you need to select HDV 1080 24p Easy Setup for HDV 24F footage. Choose HDV 1080 60i for regular interlace HDV footage.
 
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