Captured in Vegas & rendered for editing in Final Cut. Best Format Please ?

[beammeup]

Hi,

I have captured about 100 x Video 8 Tapes into Vegas 12 pro. ( circa 1988 - 2000 )
My Client wants to edit on his Mac with Final Cut.


Can anybody advise me as to the best format and settings, so I can set up
a template and I'll batch render them all onto a 2tb drive for him to use on his Mac.




any advice appreciated.


cheers
Scott

[smrpix]

Are you talking about recapturing from the original Video 8 or are you asking about re-converting the video 8 capture? If the latter, I would suggest trying to load the files into FCP as-is. The odds are better than even they will be recognized.

It would be helpful if you specify what codec the original tapes were captured with.

[Cornucopia]

As Video8 is an analog Tape format, you would have had to capture/digitize them somehow. But you don't say HOW, you just say what with.
Was it through an ADVC device or similar card through firewire and into DV format? Or was it with a standard generic analog cap card using a different codec (there are HUNDREDS to choose from)?

We can advise only so far unless we know the specifics of the capture. MediaInfo text outputs or 10sec samples of the capped clips could help here.

Anyway, it's probably likely that since you used Vegas (a Windows app), you would have used an AVI container format to save to.
Since FinalCut & Macs do not NATIVELY work with AVI, but rather Quicktime MOV, you will HAVE to convert it to a MOV-type file.

You've got 100 clips...How long? What are the bitrates? And what (ultimately) is the current filesize? 2TB is plenty of room for 100 tapes if each are ~2hr long (your average full-length Video8 tape) and each is encoded at ~23Mbps. But if you use DV for instance (which is by definition 25Mbps), you will either need to have less clips or a bigger HDD or shorter than 2hour average length. Another reason why it is helpful to know more info.

AFA which MOV codec to use? That depends all on what codec the target station has (though others COULD be installed) & what level of quality is necessary. To continue in the DV vein, it is quite trivial to transcode DV-AVI to DV-MOV while maintaining complete lossless quality during the process. IOW, it is just a re-wrapping of the same material from one container (AVI) into the other (MOV). Still 25Mbps DV. And if that does happen to be the codec used for capture, you will have not lost anything further in the whole process (since capture: DV always loses something at the very beginning).

There are better AND worse codecs to use than DV; I was just using that as an example (though a very common occurrence).

@smrpix, I would NOT give them even odds at recognizing AVI, since stock Mac QT barely NATIVELY recognizes ANY AVI codecs (it would have to be a codec that exists BOTH in the AVI/Directshow/VfW world AND in the MOV world - like Uncompressed & DV & maybe DivX/Xvid/MP4). Even then, the Mac user would then want to resave that material to MOV to make their editing easier.

Scott

[beammeup]

Thanks for your replies,

I Live in PAL Land Australia.


Half the tapes were NTSC and captured from NTSC Sony Camcorder through to a Canpous ADVC300 converter and into Vegas Pro 12, using the standard mini pin jack output to RCA connectors
Media Info says that the Videos stream is DV ( Sony NTSC ) - Audio is PCM - AVI is ( OpenDML ) bit rate is 24.4mbps


The other half were PAL tapes and were actually Mini DV tapes and were captured using a Canon XHA1 camera's Firewire output directly into the firewire port of my PC
Media Info says that the Videos stream is DV ( Sony ) - Audio is PCM - AVI is ( OpenDML ) bit rate is 29.9mbps


I can convert everything to .MOV with MPEG streamclip if i have to, but I thought that choosing the Apple DV codec under the create AVI tab might work in FCP. It looks Identical to me on MY PC and seems to take a lot less time to create the files than converting all to .MOV


Anyone tried the Apple DV Codec in FCP


cheers
Scott


PS, not being rude, but I'm about to jump on a plane, but I do appreciate any suggestions that I will read on my pad.

[smrpix]

Given that these are DV files I would absolutely try to open them directly in FCP as-is first. If that doesn't work it is, as Cornucopia says, trivial to re-wrap them as mov with mpegstreamclip or ffmpeg or QuickTime Pro.