Final Cut Pro X - Import AVCHD?

Well, it depends on the content. If there's not too much movement, it can play OK on a computer. With a reasonable amount of movement, the two fields will start to display as combing. It's great that what you're doing is working for you. It still makes sense that if delivery is to the Web, to shoot progressive in the first place.

Russ

I've been trying to read everything here and am going to stick out my nose to say this:

For the past couple of years, I've been using a Canon Vixia HF G10 and have had an ongoing problem of importing video footage from the SDXC memory cards to iMovie '11. Often, iMovie will attempt to import the footage and then after half an hour or an hour -- depending on the size of the footage -- it will inform me that there's been an error and recommends that I archive it. I've had to import and convert the video footage in MTS to MP4 files and merge them through Aimersoft Video Converter, which is extremely time-consuming and frustrating. Originally, I thought I had purchased inferior brands of SDXC cards, but after experimenting with two different brands, this does not seem to be the case. It seems that iMovie doesn't fully support AVCHD, is that right?

I'm contemplating about purchasing FCP X so I can import the video footage this way from now on.

Hi !

I'm having a nightmare trying to edit Hacked GH2 footage in FCPX.

I've dumped the entire private folder to the desktop without chaning anything in the folder structure, but when I try to import clips from it, only the first couple AVCHD clips are showing up (Say there's 39 clips only the first 11 and the photos are showing up for import). Has anybody else had this problem / know of a solution ??

Thanks,

Vincent

This can happen when the card is corrupted or the there are different specs of media recorded.

Hi Everyone

I'm now using FCPX 10.1.1 and the re-designed user interface caused me some challenges!

I had shot video in 1080p60, and wanted to render down to 1080p30, mostly for file size issues. (And actually to 540p30 for web but that's not the point of this post).

Anyhow, I made an appropriate 1080p30 compressor preset, did my export, and discovered that every frame had motion blur. It was not a nice blur, but a sharp-edged blur with the blur region comprising the sum of half of each of the two frames that were being merged into one. So a black on white blur had a sharp edged grey blur region that didn't look good and was visible during playback.

What I wanted was for the export process to just drop every second frame, so that each p30 frame was sharp and clean.

In the past I would change the project properties to 1080p30, then export at 1080p30, and the exported file would be made from every second frame. But I couldn't figure out how to do this in 10.1.1.... ????

Eventually I figured it out. Not so obvious, nor ideal, but works....

- Go the the top left 'Library' window, where the events for the libraries are listed.

- Select the Event with your clips in it.

- Scroll to the top - you see above the clips, a Project! Select it...

- Now in the info at right, you can see it's settings - but you still can't change them! Grrr!

- here's the trick: with your Event selected, make a New project.

- use custom settings for the project (in this case 1090p30, but it can be whatever you need for export)

- go to your original p60 project and copy everything on its timeline

- paste your entire timeline content into the p30 project!

Now you can export the p30 project from p60 original without frame blurring! Yay! The output is crisp, being made from individual alternate frames.

If anyone knows a really good motion blur plugin that allows control of blur when going from p60 to p30 on export, I'd be grateful for advice on it. I appreciate that p30 with a lot of movement can be 'jerky' to watch on big screens and that good motion blur would be better. I should have shot with a slower shutter speed (I forgot). On the other hand, on computers it's nice to freeze video and see a sharp frame within the movement!

Cheers

Chris

Changing property settings is the same as it has been in previous versions.

Compressor has a number of controls for dealing with frame blending. The default may not work well if there's a lot of fast motion.

Tom

In 10.1.1, the edit project settings dialog allows us to change the size of the video window, eg go from 1080HD to 720HD, but it DOES NOT allow any change in frame rate.

I recall that in the past I could change frame rate in the project settings dialog, for example from 60p to 30p. This recollection may or may not be correct. But - and you try it - in 10l.1.1 it is not possible to change frame rate of a project. And the way to go about it is different, it took me some time to find where 'projects' were hidden! :-)

It is useful to be able to change 1080p60 down to 1080p30 without blending frames, in practical terms by keeping every second frame, so that there is no 'blend blur'. Blend blur is not attractive at all.

As you say, Compressor used to have controls for frame blending. The current version 4.1 has three different modes frame resizing and retiming. Retiming settings apply only when retiming the entire clip in the General tab of the compressor settings. Resizing is not relevant here. Neither have any effect when Compressor 4.1 drops a 60p original frame rate to 30p; it always generates 'blend blur' frames in doing so, and I can't find any work-around.

Frame blending options may appear if the source is interlaced, but I can't actually see any frame blending options in Compressor 4.1.

I would have liked to see some control over how to handle frame rate changes in Compressor. It appears to 'do its own thing' and there are no user adjustments. It would be nice to have the option of choosing every second frame, instead of making a blended frame, but I can't find that option anywhere. It would be nice to have a 'professional' motion blur option, perhaps as an added Video Effect in the Compressor preset - but there is none.

Please check for yourself - if you can figure out a way to stop the dreaded 'blend blur', when dropping frame rate from 60p to 30p in Compressor, or a way to change project frame rate in the edit project settings dialog, please let us all know.

Otherwise the approach I describe above will, I hope, be useful to anyone seeking to halve frame rate while keeping the frames 'sharp'.

No version of FCP has ever allowed the change of the application timebase while there is video in the project. The controls may look different in 4.1 but I don't believe any have been removed. Changing the frame rate in the project is the way to do this anyway, not in a compression application.

Thanks for clarifying that it never allowed changing the timebase, I obviously didn't remember that correctly.

Things have definitely been moved around quite a bit - the Retiming Quality controller seems to be the one that affects deinterlacing and blending options. The lowest option uses the nearest frame (no blur ever), the medium option may cause blend blur, and the highest option seems to do the best job but not sure exactly what it does.

Also I noticed that in Compressor 4.1 if the user selects H.264 as the Quicktime export mode then they can't select field dominance to apply if the original was interlaced, but if you choose say HD720p for output you can select incoming field dominance. I don't recall this restriction previously. However with H.264 you can select quality, but in HD720p you can't? Doesn't entirely make sense.

Otherwise I definitely prefer the new arrangement of the windows; very clever indeed.

I bought ClipWrap to download Sony Video Files. I cannot get ClipWrap to see the SD Card or event when I download the SD card to a folder on the HD - I still can't get ClipWrap to open the Sony SD video card. What am I doing wrong?