When I first started cutting in Final Cut Pro X I used it in the default settings which would automatically make Prores files in the background and swap out my H264 files without me even realizing it. In the summer of 2012 I did a 2 week job travelign across country in a tour bus cutting 2-3 deliverables a day from 5 cameras all shooting H264. I knew I would not have time to transcode anything so, realizing that there was a menu option to turn of transcoding, I wondered if I even needed it. After all, why have an option to turn it OFF if you absolutely need it.
As it turned out my 2010 Macbook Pro handled the media perfectly and I had no problems for those 2 weeks. Since then I have not transcoded any Canon H264 media. The tutorials below are from when I used to cut in FCP7. They are still very popular and are viewed all the time. But I wanted you to know that today I’m doing all my work in FCPX and find it to be the most efficient and fastest system available. If you’d like to hear more about FCPX and hear from others that are using it in their business, please listen in on my podcast FCPX Grill. You can find it on iTunes.
If you are looking to add more codecs when using MPEG Streamclip, or if you don’t have the same choices that my machine does in the demo… check out this tutorial here.
Check out my Canon EOS FCP Plug-In Tutorial here.
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Coming Soon: A detailed explanation on how to store large amounts of data VERY inexpensively.
The 5DMK2 takes great images in video mode but the H264 file format sucks for editing. This shows how I go about converting those files for use in Final Cut Pro.
Some people have asked me about the DVCPro HD codec. If you don’t have Final Cut Pro installed you may not have access to this codec. It’s not to hard to come by. I choose to work in 720P just out of convenience. 1080 files are just overkill most of the time. (I know I’m gonna catch crap for saying that.) But seriously, i recently put some content on 50 foot wide screens and the producer of the show, who’s reputation is impeccable, actually said that 1080 was not necessary.
Update: I keep getting emails about the codecs or “components”, as they are called. Here is a great discussion that till get you going in the right direction.
The bottom line is if you don’t have Final Cut Pro installed you won’t have all the same codecs that my machine shows in the demo. If you find somene that will share with you you could copy all the .component files you want, like ProRes and DVCPro HD, to your machine and they will appear in YOUR pull down menu.