Canon HF100, and HV-100 archiving with Mac
 

Love the camera, and so far, editing on the Mac in FCP has been fine. I also purchased Canon's DVD archiving unit, the HV-100, and have dutifully archived my footage to AVCHD's. Canon, however, tells me that Mac can't access those AVCHD files until Apple gets off it's rear end, and starts supporting Blu-Ray. I supposed I could go third party with Toast and/or Adobe's Encore but am reluctant to borrow the hassles not to mention the cost.

So, is there ANY way of reading an AVCHD disk on a mac?

One approach might be to put the disk back into the HV-100, set it to "Play," and connect it to a Mac via a USB "A" to "A" cable, if such a beastie exists. Hopefully, just as a SDHC chip's files can be accessed either while in a HF-100 or in a card reader attached to a Mac through the USB port, so too the AVCHD disk would appear on the desktop if the HV-100 was properly connected through the port.

Thanks in advance.

How are you editing the clips on a Mac? My buddy brought one over and we couldn't get the clips to play or import- what's the Mac workflow for users of FCP?

On Final Cut Express, it is "Log And Transfer". I'm sure there's a logical reason for it, but I think they could have made a better choice.

But you need FCE 4, Final Cut Studio 2 or iMovie '08. Older versions won't support it.

Just use the log and transfer function in the most recent version of Final Cut Pro; it works by transcoding the clip to a (much) larger version using ProRes or AIC. I assume iMovie works the same way.

How long does this take? Real-time, or faster (or slower).
I'd also love to know what file type the AVCHD is converted to.
Thanks, Malcolm

Hmm, using an Intel MacBook Pro (it's got to be an Intel based Mac) it's about real time for the transfer. It works for both the camera hooked up to USB port as well as a card reader with the SDHC chip plugged in. At least I remember it being about real time as I left it to do it on it's own.

I convert to ProRes and you've go to pay attention to EXACTLY which codec you use if you want to mix footage with, in my case, HDV footage recorded simultaneously. Though clips with different codecs play nice on the timeline, they have to have the same codec/dimensions to make Multiclips. This means, after I capture the HDV footage, I have to Batch Export it to the exact ProRes codec as the AVCHD stuff.

It sounds like archived AVCHD disks are going to be for play only until Apple gets off its keester and offers Blu-Ray. Too bad, for a platform that pitches itself to content CREATORS that they are emphasizing content CONSUMERS through their iTunes Movie downloads store.

Double Hmmmm. Though what I said about Multiclips is true, it turns out two 17.5 MBps clips choke my venerable G5. A single stream works fine but two or more streams stutters no matter what I set my sequence prefs to. I'm experimenting with down rezzing the ProRes to HDV to run Multiclips.

More later