Importing FCP X footage?!

[Andrew Clark]

Hello and Happy New Year all,

My question ....

.... Is there a way to import clips .... that were archived / imported / captured into FCP X ... into a Windows version of PPRO CS6?

I know there's got to be a way to do this since we can put men on the moon ... but I'm a bit clueless as to how.

[Battle Vaughan]

There's not much information to go on, here. What format are the clips? If they are .mov files made with a codec that also appears in PPro, you should be able to import them with no problem. Apparently you have tried without success---can you give more info on what happened, what error messages, or whatever?

[Andrew Clark]

Thanks for your reply Battle.

OK, here's what I've done and where I'm at so far:

With Hi-8 and MiniDV tapes, I've Archived (FCP X) and Captured (PPRO CS6, Win 7 64bit) the footage into both applications with no problems.

FCP X -
After the Archiving process is finished, I go to check the footage and notice that FCP X breaks the footage into small QT files ... a lot of them!! Most of them play back fine. But I noticed a few have a 1 second segment of the clip separate from the main clip it should be associated with. Hard to explain. I guess the best way to describe it is like so:

The file should be: CLIP

But, the file is like this: _LIP
And the other (1 second long) part of the file is like this: C

So where the _ is, it should have the C there to make it complete .... (CLIP).

Does that make sense?


OK, so now over to the Windows side (PPRO CS6, Win 7 64bit).

I access the Mac drive where that FCP X Archive footage is at and play it back in the QT player. It does play back fine; although it does not look as clear as the (Win 7) PPRO captured footage playing back in WMP. But once I import (the QT file) into PPRO, it looks fine. So I suppose it's just the QT Player; and yes, I checked to verify that I have the latest version of the QT player.

So that's what I've done so far.

Is there something I should be doing different to eliminate the issue about the QT clips I mentioned above?

If more information is needed, please advise.

[Battle Vaughan]

Minor issue, but the QT playback is easily fixed, go file>preferences>quicktime player> use high quality playback.

As to the hash that your archived files are in, I must admit I haven't a clue, as my FCP experience ended at FCP7 and I don't know what FCP-X is doing to your files. Is it possible to go further back in the process than archives and import the original clips that were imported into FCP-X?

Maybe if you post to the FCP_X forum about the clip problem someone there would be able to help. If P\Pro can't parse the clips, it may be that some header information is being separated in the 1-second sections that are separated from the main body of the clip, and PPro can't identify the clip. Just a shot in the dark, though, as this is outside my experience.

One tedious possibility: use a file joining program to assemble the split clips back to whole. SimpleFileJoiner, good freeware, is among the possibilities. http://www.peretek.com/sfj/ and here: http://www.ehow.com/how_6457464_join-mov-files.html

[Andrew Clark]

The QT playback issue is resolved ... many thanks for pointing that out for me!!

But the QT clip issue / problem is still there .... even after I tried Importing the footage into a New Event instead of utilizing the "Create Archive" function. It just moved the problem to another clip ... whereas the clip I was referring to originally ... is now fine. Bizarre.

I checked the tape a few times just to make sure it looked fine and there weren't any visually apparent dropped / skewed frames. Everything looked fine. I even played the footage frame by frame ... and all was fine.

Now, here's another bizarre issue: Using WMP to play back the footage I originally captured into PPRO, it stops about 10 seconds in and pops up this error:

"Windows Media Player cannot play the file. The Player might not support the file type or might not support the codec that was used to compress the file."

But when I click on the play head slider farther into the footage, it resumes playing!! Hmmm ... I was thinking it was dropped frames or a corrupt section of the tape, but like I stated earlier, the footage looks fine via the camcorder. (Oh, and if I open the file / Project in PPRO, it plays fine.)

Other files captured playback fine (in WMP) .. so maybe something that is visually undetectable in this particular tape is causing this?!

Oh, and if I open the file / Project in PPRO, it plays fine.

Regarding the QT files issue, I'll post over in the FCP X section as you suggested.

I'll give SimpleFileJoiner a look; thanks for that as well.

[Battle Vaughan]

I went back to SimpleFileJoiner to check, .mov files can be iffy --- .avi, .wmv and .mpg work fine --- so you may want to try the procedure outlined in the second link using Quicktime or mpegStreamclip.

In Quicktime, open the files you want to join. In one do edit>select all, then edit>copy. In the other file window, put the time cursor where you want the appended file to start, do edit>paste. Save the resulting file with a different file name to avoid over-writing the original. Pretty quick to do.

[Andrew Clark]

Battle (that's one cool name by the way!!) -

Thanks for the SFJ advice. I may pursue that option if I see more of this happening. It's not by any means a clip that I'd lose sleep over by not being able to capture it correctly. But all the same, I'll try your suggestions .... just in case for any possible future repeats of this scenario!!

[Tim Kolb]

Overall, you have to consider that QuickTime on the Windows side is still old 32 bit QT 7.x...not the new, shiny media foundation that Apple has constructed for their OS. Premiere Pro is 64 bit and 32 bit codecs and media architecture wouldn't even work with PPro if Adobe hadn't written their own frameserver application that runs in the background to keep it on life-support.

FCPX has gotten so much of the attention of the industry (good and bad) that most seem to miss the point that the biggest obstacle to Apple being part of a mixed platform post production industry is that they've left their own media architecture become a serious bottleneck on the OS that the industry has been migrating to (Windows) to do the heavy-lifting in post.