going from Premiere to FCP... help!

P

ProjectCanada

Member
Hi,

So I've taken the plunge and got myself a new FCP setup. I had been using Premiere for quite some time, but I had been convinced that Final Cut was the way to go for a movie I'm working on. I've been having some problems though... All the video I captured using premiere (24p advanced, DVX100a) looks strange when I've transferred it over to my new mac. It's pixelated more (or aliased... if that's the correct term) lines aren't as sharp. I get a warning when I import the video into final cut that says something like "it is highly recommended that you recapture media or use media manager to optomize it for... something something something. Anyone know what's going on with this? The video doesn't look right even when I play it with quicktime or something outside of final cut. Any help would be greatly appreciated!!!!

-Johnathan
 
Not certain that I understand why you went from Premiere to FCP, but that isn't your question. How did you export your project and/or clips out of PPro?
 
It would be much better to simply recapture the tapes on your Mac. On Premiere on a PC you're working in AVI, on Mac you're working in QuickTime. You can convert from one to the other, but there's a loss in quality.

Noah
 
NoahK said:
It would be much better to simply recapture the tapes on your Mac. On Premiere on a PC you're working in AVI, on Mac you're working in QuickTime. You can convert from one to the other, but there's a loss in quality.

Noah
Click to expand...
If I decided to go ahead and convert from one to the other, how bad would the loss in quality be? and how would I do it if I decided to? The only reason is that I'm talking about 80 hours of video... recapturing it would be hell unless you think it's truly necessary.
 
khmuse said:
Not certain that I understand why you went from Premiere to FCP, but that isn't your question. How did you export your project and/or clips out of PPro?
Click to expand...
I'm not exporting anything out of premiere, I simply used premiere to capture my video originally. Now I'll be using FCP... I assumed I could simply unplug my external drives from my PC and plug them into my mac and that everything would be fine and dandy, but it's not turning out that way. Even when I play the files right off the hard drive without importing them into final cut there is a really noticable loss in quality compared to if i played them on my PC.
 
The differences between an .avi and a .mov file format are trivial. The byte orders are different the headers are different, but at the same data rates, they are very similar.

I would suggest that you capture just one portion of one tape using FCP. Then compare the .avi version (acquired by the PC running PPro) with the .mov version (acquired by the MAC running FCP). There are two possible explanations for what you are experiencing.

It may be possible that the hardware of your Mac is inferior compared to the hardware in your PC. This could explain the difference you are seeing.

It may be possible that the Mac does a poor job of playing an .avi file format.

One or the other will be the cause and it should be obvious once you make the comparison.
 
AVI vs MOV is not a big deal, indeed. They are just wrappers. This whole debate has often come up with the P2 on a Mac vs P2 on a PC debate. But I think the last comment about Macs and AVIs is a little more likely part of the root of your problem. So you may need to recapture all of your media unfortunately. I'm kind of surprised though that FCP wouldn't make you render all the AVIs once they hit the timeline (which would be a heck of a lot more time lost then the recapture I would think).

But hey if FCP just doesn't turn out to be your cup of tea, Adobe did recently announce they are bringing PPro back to the Mac. Good luck.

cheers.
 
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