Final Cut Pro 3 import formats?

[LanceSteel]

I'm capturing some video for a guy who knows nothing about video capturing. I'm on a PC and he's on a Mac. I used Pinnacle Studio 7 to capture from my firewire box and have the avi's (in DV format) on my HD. He has Final Cut Pro 3. What I want to know is what format (DV, Mjpeg, QT) of video file can give him that he would be able import and edit in Final Cut?

The program description says that you can only import and edit in DV format. Is that right?

Thanks.

[jchansen]

Final cut pro can import any quicktime-compatible format. Just like AVI, QT is a container, not a format. I think he should be able to import your AVI DV files. If not, save as a QT file in any format you like. If the AVIs are unreadable, have hime update his quicktime software first, to make sure he's not missing a component.

iMovie, the little brother to FCP, is the one that only uses DV streams. FCP will render your files in DV as a working format, but this is after the import.

[LanceSteel]

Thanks. So a QT "container" using a compression codec like MJPEG should be ok for import? I don't know this guy (whom I'm doing the A->D conversion) so I'm learly about letting him use my cap box and I really don't want to burn 7 dvd's for his 2 hour video.

Thanks again.

[jchansen]

Yes, QT with Motion JPEG-A would be fine, but I would set the compression to something like 90% unless he is doing broadcast work. Otherwise the files will be so huge. At least with a little compression it cuts the size down some. That still will be something in the neighborhood of the size of DV.

Personally, I would encode it to a high bitrate mpeg2, as long as he has the apple mpeg2 component which allows it to be imported. I can't imagine burning 7 DVDs of video for someone. If he has two hours, put one hour on each, with a bitrate of 9.8.

Another option that I would be more likely to do is visit his machine with your HD. Better still if you have an external firewire or usb enclosure; if he has a power mac then the case is so easy to open, that popping your drive in would be easy. That also depends on the format of your drive, which is something I don't know a lot about on a PC.

[LanceSteel]

Thanks again for the info. I ended up doing an Mpeg1 file with a bitrate of 2400kbps. The 2 hour video compressed to a nice 2.4GB which I was able to burn on a single dvd. The quality looks pretty good too (at 352x240.) For some reason quicktime 6.0 didn't like the dv avi's that I had. It would only encode the first 4mins and then it would just quit. Anyway, thanks for the help.

[offline]

LanceSteel,

try these:

http://www.kmstudio.com.ua/video/codecs/Avid_Meridien_YUV_&_MJPEG_v9.4_codec.exe

http://www.kmstudio.com.ua/video/codecs/FASTstudio_QT_codec.exe

and you'll need QT 6

http://qtinstall.info.apple.com/qt505/us/win/QuickTimeInstaller.zip