AVI into FCP 6? (HD to SD)

[Mitchell Lewis]

I shoot with a Sony EX3 (SxS cards). I have a project that requires me to edit in Standard Definition (standard DV). This means I need to transcode my HD footage into SD. I have found a number of good solutions that offer good video quality. But I need the footage available for editing as quickly as possible.

Workflow #1) Use Sony's XDCAM Clip Browser and choose File>Export as Raw DV. This works well except for some reason the audio is transcoded into 32-bit floating point, instead of 16-bit like it should be. As a result, FCP won't play the audio without rendering. This makes it very hard to edit the footage based on audio. As a result this isn't a good option.

Workflow #2) Use Sony's XDCAM Clip Browser and choose File>Export as AVI DV. This also works well except for some reason FCP brings up a Media Performance Warning. The files still play fine, but I'm concerned there are other issues I've yet to realize that will become major problems when I'm trying to finish this project. (see attached file) Also, unlike Workflow #1, the audio plays fine without any rendering.

Workflow #3) Use Apple's Compressor to convert the XDCAM EX 720 60p files to DV. This yields the best quality, but it's about 25% slower than using XDCAM Clip Browser.

So here's my question.......

Does anyone have any experience with the Media Performance Warning? The files seem to play fine. Should I just ignore the error message? If I used Media Manager like the Warning message suggests, then I loose all the transcoding speed advantage.

Any help/advice would be appreciated.

[Mitchell Lewis]

Never mind. Found this in the FCP manual:

In rare cases, Final Cut Pro alerts you if imported media files cannot be optimized for
multiple-stream, real-time playback. These files are perfectly fine to use in your
Final Cut Pro project. Unless you are editing with multiple uncompressed video streams
that demand maximum media file performance, you can usually leave the files as they
are and continue editing normally. Since Final Cut Pro always optimizes files when
capturing, simply recapturing should maximize the file’s performance.

I'm going to just ignore the warning and hope for the best. Cross your fingers for me. :)