I currently own a HPX170 and love it but I hate the cost of the P2 cards. I shoot alot of long form footage and would like to add an additional solid state camera. I am considering the HMC150 because it is very close to the 170 and the cost of the cards are reasonable. My question is: What will I need to do differently in FCP to bring in the footage? With the P2 card footage all I do is drag the footage from the P2 card to the external hard drive and log and transfer into FCP. Please advise.
FCP 7 and HMC 150 Question
- Thread starter nklaeser
- Start date
Michael Carter
Veteran
You have to either work from the card itself, or copy the ENTIRE card to a hard drive, leaving all the file structure intact.
Set up your Audio-video settings to match your footage (IE, 24p 1080) and open log & transfer. If the card is mounted, it will find it automatically (it can take like 20 seconds... an eternity!) and your clips will come up as usual. Select clips and run it - they'll go to wherever your scratch drive is set. (So, my advice - first set your video scratch to your project folder for this footage, and then your footage will be with your project).
If you have Perian installed, turn it off in the system preferences - it crashes my FCP, at least when doing 720-60.
I don't know if this is necessary or not, but I transfer 720-60 footage separately - I've always assumed having the AV settings to, say 1080-24 and trying to capture 720-60 will screw things up. So when i shoot for slowmo, I shoot a clip of a couple seconds of a slate (just an 8x10 whiteboard) with the words "60P" in big black marker - after I'm done shooting 60p clips, I shoot a few secs of the same slate upside down. This makes it all very clear which clips I want to select in the clip list. I also set my scratch disc to a "60p" folder in my project folder to keep those separate.
Hope that helps.
Set up your Audio-video settings to match your footage (IE, 24p 1080) and open log & transfer. If the card is mounted, it will find it automatically (it can take like 20 seconds... an eternity!) and your clips will come up as usual. Select clips and run it - they'll go to wherever your scratch drive is set. (So, my advice - first set your video scratch to your project folder for this footage, and then your footage will be with your project).
If you have Perian installed, turn it off in the system preferences - it crashes my FCP, at least when doing 720-60.
I don't know if this is necessary or not, but I transfer 720-60 footage separately - I've always assumed having the AV settings to, say 1080-24 and trying to capture 720-60 will screw things up. So when i shoot for slowmo, I shoot a clip of a couple seconds of a slate (just an 8x10 whiteboard) with the words "60P" in big black marker - after I'm done shooting 60p clips, I shoot a few secs of the same slate upside down. This makes it all very clear which clips I want to select in the clip list. I also set my scratch disc to a "60p" folder in my project folder to keep those separate.
Hope that helps.
You'll need to transcode AVCHD/AVCCAM footage on its way into FCP7, yes. I found ProResLT a decent compromise, and on my 2008 Mac Pro the transcode ran at almost the same rate as the file transfer from the SD card, so the only price you pay is disk space. FCP7 is dramatically better for this stuff than FCP6 was.
...however, I ditched FCP7 for X a year ago, and haven't looked back (or transcoded, except for heavy multicam work) since.
...however, I ditched FCP7 for X a year ago, and haven't looked back (or transcoded, except for heavy multicam work) since.