Differences in Date/Time info between FCP 7 and FCP X?

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Level 7

24,121 points

Differences in Date/Time info between FCP 7 and FCP X?

Please bear with me as I have hardly touched FCP 7 in the past 2 years, so most of what little I knew has now been forgotten!

Yesterday I captured an old 2002 Mini-DV PAL tape into FCP X.

The tape consisted of:-

1. Some original clips as they were shot.

2. Projects (edited in iMovie 2) using those clips, which had then been exported back onto the tape.

As expected, FCP X recognised the embedded info on the original clips and separated them together with details of their date and time.

What really surprised me was that the edited videos were also broken down into their original clips, complete with date and time.

This latter point would have been great except for one thing . . . . FCP X automatically arranged all the clips on the tape in order of their original shooting time and date.

This meant that all the projects were separated into their component clips and these were put alongside the original clips, thus mixing them up.

Furthermore, as you know, the clips in a project rarely appear in chronological order, so by separating them chronologically the projects were even more mixed up!!!!!!! The projects have effectively been turned into a jigsaw puzzle.

To get round this problem, I have just recaptured the tape in one take in FCP 7 which thankfully kept everything in the correct order.

Now here is the question:-

Is it possible, after using DV Start/Stop Detect and Make Subclip to find the original date and time it was shot?

You see how much I have forgotten.😟

Yet another peculiarity, is that whilst DV Start/Stop Detect can separate out the original clips that were shot, unlike FCP X it just recognises each project as a single clip.

iMac, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.2), Little knowledge... many opinions.

Posted on Mar 6, 2013 3:56 AM

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Answer 1

Mar 7, 2013 9:21 AM in response to Ian R. Brown

Not sure if this is what you're asking, but that's never stopped me before. fcp7 can not display the date and time from the metadata on the captured material although that's what it uses to do the dv start stop detect. That's the way it is and that's the way it's been since fcp1. If I remember correctly CATDV will.

http://www.squarebox.co.uk/

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Answer 2

Ian R. Brown Author

Level 7

24,121 points

Mar 8, 2013 12:07 AM in response to Michael Grenadier

Thanks for the response Michael.

Shortly after posting, fragments of my memory returned and I also remembered that FootTrack does a similar job.

As mentioned above, FCP X does very much the same and also does it excellently.

The only reason it didn't suit my tapes was because, unusually, I had put up to 3 or 4 versions of finished projects (containing the same basic clips) on the same tape, which meant that after capturing a tape in one go, I ended up with hundreds of clips containing up to 3 or 4 sets of identical clips jumbled up in a frightening video jigsaw.

Normally, FCP X is excellent but due to my peculiar use of old tapes, it fell down.

There would have been no problem if it had provided multiple identical clip names if it had kept them in the order they were on the tape and not insisted on automatically re-arranging them.

Given time, I could have sorted them but simply recapturing, though a lengthy process, was much quicker and sanity saving.

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