General Question regarding moving from FCP7 to FCPX; Log and Transfer

R

rcflood

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Last year I produced my first "real" (fully edited) film using FCP7 and my Canon DSLR. I come from a long audio background, but have gotten fairly familiar with video concepts (a lot of it is very analogous, really). I am very much still learning, though.

So, I was just wondering, what workflow do you guys use with FCPX and your Canon DSLR?

I got very used to using Canon's E-1 plugin (Log and Transfer) to audition clips, occasionally set in/out points, and then transcode them to ProRes 422 for editing in the timeline. This helped me sort through the raw clips and keep my library down to only the clips I needed (and also helped with disk space as I was only transcoding the clips I actually wanted to use).

Yesterday I got the FCPX trial, and am considering upgrading to it, as it seems to better use my MBP's power (GPU, etc).

I'm wondering, though, what workflow do you guys use to most closely emulate the Canon E-1 plugin?

The closest thing I can come up with is the following, but I'd like some advice on whether it's really doing the same thing.

So I import the clips from a shoot into an "Event". I uncheck "copy media" and uncheck "optimize clips". I then preview the clips in the library, and when I know which ones I want, I right-click on them and hit transcode, and then optimize them from the native Canon format (h.264) to ProRes 422.

This seems to save me from having to transcode every single clip on the card (which I may not use), though it's not quite as clean as using E-1 was. Is this a pretty solid approach?

On that note, since Final Cut Pro X can work natively with h.264 files, is there a *need* to transcode to ProRes 422 in this situation?? I'm assuming editing/effects/etc work better on ProRes, but I have nothing to base that on.

Any advice about whether I'm doing this correctly to match the old workflow would be greatly appreciated.

EDIT: Oh, one thing I forgot to ask, too: I did notice that when transcoding from h.264 to ProRes in FCPX, the transcode seems quite a bit slower than Canon's E-1 plugin did in FCP7. Is this just me or is it really a slower transcode?
 
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Have you tried File>Import from Camera. That would let you preview and ingest only what you need.

Noah
 
NoahK said:
Have you tried File>Import from Camera. That would let you preview and ingest only what you need.

Noah
Click to expand...

Hey Noah,

Thanks for the reply. That's good advice... If I were to do that, I suspect the workflow would be a lot closer to the original E-1 workflow.

The only problem is that I've been unable to get the Import From Camera feature to work, so far... It gives me the same old "invalid media structure" (to paraphrase) as the old E-1 would when improperly set up. I probably just need to tinker with it to get it working properly.

Thanks for your help; when I get that working I'll start using that instead of the standard Import function, as this way is much better.

Other than that, have you found the rest of the workflow I described to work pretty well?

The only thing that's bugging me so far is it's not obvious which files you've "optimized" (transcoded) and which ones are still in H.264 format (camera originals) in the Events viewer. Otherwise, FCPX has been a hell of a lot faster to edit with, for me, at least.
 
Are you bringing in from the original cards or a duplicate of the original card structure (assuming it's supported)- you would need that not just the clips themselves.

Noah
 
I've been attempting to bring in from the CS card in a card reader straight out of the 5D2. I haven't tried actually connecting the camera via USB, though, but that seems like overkill.

Cards copied to HD (retaining the DCIM/MISC) directory structure didn't work either, unfortunately; same error msg. I'll poke around, though.
 
I'm trying to figure out the same thing. I prefer to use "Import from Camera" for the initial culling of my footage to save disk space and processing. It works great for my GH2 when I copy over the entire card contents, but also get errors trying to do the same thing with cards shot with Canon. Maybe they'll update the plugin.
 
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