What's up with the AVCCAM importer for FCP?

Jan, I have to say sadly that I am severely disappointed. I was hoping this software would finally allow me to work with PROPERLY STITCHED AVCCAM footage without transcoding in FCP. There are plenty of solutions around for what I need to do that won't stitch files together properly... I thought at least Panasonic would be able to provide support for properly stitching them. Is there any hope for this in the future? As you may remember, I work in live classical music/opera recording and the average "take" is over an hour long, and a small "glitch" in the middle of a piece makes the video useless. I can transcode for my final products, but I often need to quickly dump things to a DVD for various purposes. Toast will do this, with glitches, and strange chapter points that I have no control over. Premiere Pro will sorta do this, but the authoring process is far more time-consuming than with FCP. FCP7 does exactly what I want, but needs transcoding. PLEASE if possible update this software so that I can work with properly stitched clips without glitches at 4GB boundaries! I've been waiting years!

On the other hand, to add to this thread, I'll say that the software works for what it is pretty well on my MacPro 3,1 Octo-2.8. It's just necessary to wait a minute or two after import for some kind of file analysis to be done... it is very stuttery till that analysis is done, then OK after. To seewhat I mean, open the file in Quicktime Player 7, which actually displays a sorta "progress bar" of this analysis (in the scrubber bar).
 
Am I correct in concluding that this only works with disk images or off the mounted SDHC card?

I had no success trying to use it with SDHC cards that I had copied as folders to our hard drive.
 
I tested it at home last night and I think my work system was locking up because all the stuff we do here uses spanned files and has .mts files greater than 4GB. After getting it to work at home, I was rather disappointed with the length of time it took to render a simple 3-way color corrector on a 40-second clip. I shouldn't say I am surprised though. Panasonic is great at making the hardware we all use...unfortunately, I think they are terrible at making the software that we sometimes have to use. AVCCAM Restorer and AVCCAM Viewer I find to be pretty much terrible and while I do have them, I don't ever use them. I will probably keep the AVCCAM Importer on both my work and home edit stations just so I can preview the .mts files in the Finder as opposed to using Log and Transfer. For the amount of time we had to wait for this piece of software (or codec or whatever you want to call it), I don't think it lived up to its expectations.
 
little bobby said:
Seriously.:nads:
Click to expand...

Yeah, to translate: I've been cutting miles of AVCHD native for more than a year on PP CS5


. . .I do understand the pain. I wasn't as invested in FCP as much as some people when it became clear I would need to be cutting a lot of AVCHD so there wasn't much risk involved in moving.
 
Last edited:
I've had no problem with using folders copied to a hard drive. Not sure how or why you're working with disk images... can you clarify? There's nothing in the AVCHD standard that benefits from a disk image rather than a folder copy... are you sure you are properly mounting these disk images?
 
Short clips are locking up FCP 7.0.3 on my 16 core 32GB ram system as well. Moved project to Premiere to getherdone.
 
I'm having major crashes on my Mac book pro. After crash the report says Perian plug in caused the crash. Never had this happen.

Do you copy files from card into a folder in capture scratch? I don't see a importer like xdcam.
 
I think playback in Quicktime is better than editing with Final Cut Pro. I find the performance not so good. I think I will stick to ProRes.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top