I thought I'd share this. I just got the Panasonic HMC150 (which shoots footage in compressed AVCHD files to an SD card) a little over a week ago, and I've been looking for a good workflow so that I could edit on my 1.5 year old MacBook Pro, using FinalCutPro 7. (Notes: FCP can't edit AVCHD natively, so you have to transcode.) The idea was to minimize the amount of storage the project would need (at least initially), and allow me to edit HD footage in realtime on this (relatively slower) system, without dropping frames or locking up.
I came up with a seemingly functional workflow the other day, but I'm wondering if there may be a simpler way to achieve the same thing.
My workflow:
1. Copy the entire directory structure of my SD card to a new directory on my harddrive.
2. Open FCP and go into Long and Transfer. Select my files (from my newly created directory on the harddrive), and convert transfer/encode them as Prores 422 Proxy.
3. Edit my project (using the proxy files).
4. When done, go into Finder and delete the proxy files I created (moving them into another directory would probably work just as well). All clips in your timeline will now show as disconnected.
5. Go back into Log and Transfer, and using the same original (AVCHD, in my case) files, transfer/transcode them again, BUT this time, transcode them into Prores 422 Standard.
6. In FCP, right-click on one of the disconnected files in your files window, and select Reconnect. It didn't find mine through searching, so you have to manually locate the file. Go into the scratch directory you set, where your new Prores 422 files have just been created, and select the file that matches the clip. **NOTE: you will have to UNcheck "Matched Name and Reel Only" or you won't be able to select it. Hit Reconnect. You'll probably get an error message saying that the settings of the clip don't match. Just ignore that (at least, that's what I did, and it worked perfectly).
7. Your clips should now be reconnected, but with the full Prores 422 (standard) files. You'll have to rerender your sequence, but then you should be done.
That's what worked for me. Anybody else out there have something that works better/faster/easier to accomplish the same thing?
Notes:
In theory, this means that you could delete all of the uncompressed (ProRes) files once you're done editing/exporting your project and just save the much smaller AVCHD files. If you ever need to go back into it, you could just log and transfer from the AVCHD files and reconnect them. Personally, if you have the hard drive space, I'd say you should keep them because it's good to have backups, BUT if hard drive space is at a major premium, you could delete those transcoded ProRes files if you wanted to.
Now, I'm not sure about this yet (I haven't had time to test it thoroughly), but you MIGHT have to change the settings of your sequence to match the new files. I was just reading something about that in an older article. I don't THINK that'll be necessary, because if you're going from one ProRes format to another ProRes format you should have the same frame size and frame rate.
Thoughts?
-BR
http://50in50.wordpress.com
I came up with a seemingly functional workflow the other day, but I'm wondering if there may be a simpler way to achieve the same thing.
My workflow:
1. Copy the entire directory structure of my SD card to a new directory on my harddrive.
2. Open FCP and go into Long and Transfer. Select my files (from my newly created directory on the harddrive), and convert transfer/encode them as Prores 422 Proxy.
3. Edit my project (using the proxy files).
4. When done, go into Finder and delete the proxy files I created (moving them into another directory would probably work just as well). All clips in your timeline will now show as disconnected.
5. Go back into Log and Transfer, and using the same original (AVCHD, in my case) files, transfer/transcode them again, BUT this time, transcode them into Prores 422 Standard.
6. In FCP, right-click on one of the disconnected files in your files window, and select Reconnect. It didn't find mine through searching, so you have to manually locate the file. Go into the scratch directory you set, where your new Prores 422 files have just been created, and select the file that matches the clip. **NOTE: you will have to UNcheck "Matched Name and Reel Only" or you won't be able to select it. Hit Reconnect. You'll probably get an error message saying that the settings of the clip don't match. Just ignore that (at least, that's what I did, and it worked perfectly).
7. Your clips should now be reconnected, but with the full Prores 422 (standard) files. You'll have to rerender your sequence, but then you should be done.
That's what worked for me. Anybody else out there have something that works better/faster/easier to accomplish the same thing?
Notes:
In theory, this means that you could delete all of the uncompressed (ProRes) files once you're done editing/exporting your project and just save the much smaller AVCHD files. If you ever need to go back into it, you could just log and transfer from the AVCHD files and reconnect them. Personally, if you have the hard drive space, I'd say you should keep them because it's good to have backups, BUT if hard drive space is at a major premium, you could delete those transcoded ProRes files if you wanted to.
Now, I'm not sure about this yet (I haven't had time to test it thoroughly), but you MIGHT have to change the settings of your sequence to match the new files. I was just reading something about that in an older article. I don't THINK that'll be necessary, because if you're going from one ProRes format to another ProRes format you should have the same frame size and frame rate.
Thoughts?
-BR
http://50in50.wordpress.com
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