M-PEG Streamclip vs. EOS FCP Plug-in?
 

I've been converting my footage to Apple ProRes 422 with M-PEG Streamclip. This works very well for me but I have a question. Would there be any advantage in switching to using Canon's FCP plug-in aside from not having to convert footage and thus having more hard drive space available?

From what I've been told, the EOS plug-in allows FCP to edit the native h.264 files. Thats all. Am I wrong?

Wouldn't you still want to get the clips out of h.264? Wouldn't ProRes 422 give you a better color space?

It doesn't allow you to edit in the h.264 codec, as you point out you wouldn't want to do that anyway, it converts it to ProRes jut like MPEG Streamclip. I know some people prefer sticking with Streamclip but I think the footage looks better running it through the EOS plugin with Final Cut.

Set it to ProRes LT and you're in good shape.

One other benefit of using the E1 Log and Transfer utility... You get timecode. Well, you get the time of day that the clock in your EOS camera was set to... That can be really helpful, especially when trying to find matching sound clips from your second sound system (like the H4N). It can also be helpful to find what you're looking for that much faster.

You can also pick in and out points for each clip, instead of just the whole clip or nothing. This can be a real space and time saver. Being able to play through each clip before doing so is nice, too.

One last benefit: you can name titles of clips and enter other metadata. This can really be helpful when you're trying to organize your edit. Nothing like good old fashioned names of clips instead of just a running auto sequence.

I've heard of some people who still prefer MPEG Streamclip, but I'm totally sold on the E1 utility.

Hi Eric,

Great points. I'm going to have to mess around with the plugin more. Currently I'm using steamclip because of the speed benefit - its 30-40% faster - and at a wedding for a same-day edit I just don't have the time to pick and choose which shots to encode, so I find streamclip's batch encoder set to 'join files' makes the edit considerably faster.

Is there a way to get the option to export prores in Windows version of mpegstreamclip? Or is avi and dnxhd the way to go when working in Windows?