XHA1 and FINAL CUT --- Problems?

can you get a firestore for the a1 and record 1080/24f and bring in the footage into FCP that way?

Yes, but you specifically need the FS-C in order to be able to record HDV in the QT 1080 24p format. M2t won't work in a FCP HDV 1080 24p timeline.
 
Transcoding isn't nearly as bad as it sounds, but in general, my approach to post with a doc would be to edit native HDV and convert some material/sequences when needed to ProRes. (for AE, Shake etc.) If you want to capture directly to ProRes you can get a new AJA IO HD. It has the codec integrated into hardware.

Thanks again for the help.

Just two more questions.

About how long, in your experience does it take to transcode an hour of HDV to AIC and to PRO RES?

Also, a friend told me that I would need a Mac Pro (Xeon) to run pro res. He said it wouldn't run on a macbook pro (even the latest and greatest). Is that true?

Thanks again.

M
 
About how long, in your experience does it take to transcode an hour of HDV to AIC and to PRO RES?

ProRes takes about twice as long to transcode on my Mac (Dual 2.7 G5--probably slightly slower than a newer MacBook Pro) than AIC. Converting to AIC would take roughly an hour for one hour of HDV.

Also, a friend told me that I would need a Mac Pro (Xeon) to run pro res. He said it wouldn't run on a macbook pro (even the latest and greatest). Is that true?

I highly doubt that. It should work fine on G5's and above. It's damn snappy on my machine. It'd probably work fine on a regular MacBook, actually.[/QUOTE]

The difference between AIC and ProRes is huge in the file size department. A one minute HDV clip (about 185 MB) became a 371 MB file as AIC and 1.17 GB as 10 bit ProRes HQ. The differences are subtle, but subtle color is retained in ProRes and will certainly stand up to filtering, fx and multiple generations of renders WAAAAY better than AIC.

All I did to test was right click on an HDV clip in the browser and choose Media Manager. The settings looked like this:
1182020973.jpg


The part that says "modified" is inaccurate for some reason though. I think it was just calculating the file size of a simple duplication of the clip, rather than the actual conversion to ProRes HQ.

Lots of flexibility overall. If you had a Firestore C, you could shoot to tape and to hard disk and simply put the tapes away for safety. From there, you can drag and drop the HDV files from the Firestore without actually copying them into the system, and can transcode to AIC or ProRes. My personal preference is to use the media manager, which retains all the file and log info so that your newly transcoded material has the exact same timecode and relevant info as the source HDV clips. This way you can easily go back to the original HDV clips if needed.
 
If you go to an Apple store you can try out HDV editing on one of their laptops. They usually have one or two projects with footage available.

That's a great point. I have actually done that. (The Apple store is a block from my house. They have a HDV project there about kids surfing)

Also, I am going to rent the Canon as well as the HVX and just try the workflows. THanks for all of your help..

M
 
I usually lurk, but I thought I would chime in because I'm also a new owner of an XH-A1 and I am using FCS2 to edit video on a recent c2d macbook pro. I have to say that it seems to work pretty well. I have used "clip", "now", and "batch" to bring in video using HDV 1080p24. Everything seems to work okay. The only problems that I have had were with trying to "clip" and "batch" certain parts of video that for some reason FCP6 could not read the proper timecode. For example, I would record something at the beginning of tape for a few minutes, and in fcp6 I would mark my in and out points, and then click on "clip", the vtr thing rewinds the tape and seems to go past my in point and just stops. The capture window just sits there and eventually times out. I really think this is user error, because I'm new to this whole thing and may not be doing something right when I record stuff. For these parts I just use the "now" capture.

I haven't tried to use AIC since the native HDV capture seems to be working fine for me, and editing native HDV seems pretty decent on my hardware.
 
Rather than marking an in and out point and clicking on "clip", try "log clip", give it a name and then right click on the logged clip in the browser and click on "batch capture". If one works for you than you can log an entire tape and let FCP capture it all unattended.

If you have the disk space to spare, it's even easier to simply mark an in point at the beginning of a tape (you need pre-roll though...best to not set your in point any earlier than 10 seconds into the physical beginning of the tape) and then fast forward to the end of a tape and mark the out point. Then log the entire tape as one clip. If you have scene detection enabled (a check box under the "clip settings" tab in the log and capture window) FCP will capture the entire tape and give you separate clips for each individual start/stop point of footge recorded on the tape.

It's like this: If you logged the single clip as "Tape 1", the individual clips captured throughout the tape will be sequetially labled "Tape 1-1, Tape 1-2, Tape 1-3", etc, etc.

I find this to be a very convenient option. It's easy enough to change the name of any paricular clip once it's been captured if the original clip name is too generic.

Good luck.
 
Rather than marking an in and out point and clicking on "clip", try "log clip", give it a name and then right click on the logged clip in the browser and click on "batch capture". If one works for you than you can log an entire tape and let FCP capture it all unattended.

If you have the disk space to spare, it's even easier to simply mark an in point at the beginning of a tape (you need pre-roll though...best to not set your in point any earlier than 10 seconds into the physical beginning of the tape) and then fast forward to the end of a tape and mark the out point. Then log the entire tape as one clip. If you have scene detection enabled (a check box under the "clip settings" tab in the log and capture window) FCP will capture the entire tape and give you separate clips for each individual start/stop point of footge recorded on the tape.

It's like this: If you logged the single clip as "Tape 1", the individual clips captured throughout the tape will be sequetially labled "Tape 1-1, Tape 1-2, Tape 1-3", etc, etc.

I find this to be a very convenient option. It's easy enough to change the name of any paricular clip once it's been captured if the original clip name is too generic.

Good luck.

I don't mean to hijack the thread but this is great advice. I will give it a shot tomorrow and see how it goes. Can you explain a little further about not setting the in point less then 10 seconds from the beginning of the physical tape? Could this be the reason why I can't capture some things that are recorded in the beginning?
 
It's not a hard and fast rule...just my own conclusion from NLE capture experiences.

I just had trouble batch capturing when I set my in point any less than 8 seconds into a tape--and I often had trouble at 8 seconds so I learned to just not record anything I cared about until at least 10 seconds had rolled from the beginning of the tape.
 
I haven't been able to bact capture when using AIC... or HDV for that matter. AIC capture only allows me to "cature now", and when I try to batch capture HDV it can never find the timecode.
 
Try eliminating the first clip from your capture batch. I had this same problem where i have an in point of 00:00;00, and another in point at 03:41;00. When I started the batch of the second clip, it was able to find it.
 
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