Rendering AVCHD with FCP7

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Level 1

4 points

Rendering AVCHD with FCP7

I have a Panasonic HMC40, to which I log and transfer the footage via the SD card. All plays fine for editing, as well as rendering, until I play the actual .mov file, in my case is 20 mins long. The video will not play past 2:00 and will not allow me to scrub. The final render file also makes 10 individual files (plus the .mov file) and all are 2.15 gb each.

Never ran into this before, and find it very strange. Any insight or help would be appreciated! Attached is a photo

-Ant

MacBook Pro, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.3)

Posted on May 16, 2013 5:45 PM

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Answer 1

Meg The Dog

Level 6

13,561 points

May 16, 2013 6:27 PM in response to AntLefty

Did you recently change your scratch disk? It looks like this disk is formatted to MS-DOS, not Mac.

MtD

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Answer 2

May 17, 2013 10:43 AM in response to AntLefty

I suspect that your camera is formating the SD card in FAT32 format -- this seems to be the general practice among camera manufacturers (FAT32 being the "lowest common denominator" among disc formats). FAT32 has a maximum file size of 2GB, so the camera records your video across multiple files, even continuous takes. Also, when you transfer the files via FCP, it transcodes the files into a format more suitable for editing (such as Apple ProRes). FCP cannot play AVCHD files directly. If you want to play AVCHD files directly, you'll need a player like VLC media player (free download -- Google it).

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