Editing PC Clips on Mac FCP

P

prodigal

Active member
I like to record clips from PC games using either Playclaw or Fraps and edit them on Mac w/ FCP and AE. So far I either do one of two things: transfer the raw Fraps files to my Mac and convert them to MOV/MPEG-4 via Mac Quicktime and edit this way. Or I convert the Playclaw files with a windows converter into MOV/MPEG-4 and then transfer them and edit this way. My question is, is MPEG-4 the best format to edit in for what I'm doing here or should I be using a different format/codec all together? And additionally, what format should I be exporting to for Youtube, if anyone has experience in things like this. Thanks very much for any help!
 
Nope- they should be ProRes .MOV clips for best editing quality. For YouTube, .MOV H.264 codec.

Noah
 
actually it depends on a number of things, which formats can you record and what settings do they allow. mpeg-4 can be set to horrible quality or incredible quality, h.264 is mpeg-4 level 10 and is a very good compression, so you can get more for your space, but in your case you should try maxing out the bitrate when recording. see what the max bitrates are for each codec, mpeg-2 is also tried and true, but roughly 1.5 times less efficient as 264.

the two key things are the bitrate and resolution, make sure you set the resolution to the same resolution that the game is being played at, and set the bitrate fairly high. try it a few different ways, see what sticks

and if those clips import to final cut and playback smoothly, there's no need to transcode to prores
 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJr560bqLyA

Your best bet obviously is to use anything other than FCP. If you are going to use FRAPS (great choice) to record your video games it might be wise to make use of bootcamp and Pinnacle Studio, Vegas Studio or even use MS's Movie Maker. All the PC programs can make use of the FRAPS native codec. I prefer to use PP CS4.
 
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