I want to switch!!!
 

So i would really like to switch over to mac, and pick up a dual 2.5ghz G5. FCP looks very appealing, although I don't mind premiere pro which i currently use. I am hesitant to switch though.

I am about to edit a large project I am working on, which amounts to just about 200 gigs of source footage. I have all of the footage backed up on a lacie 250gig external drive as well, so it could easily be connected to a mac.

Since all my footage is in .avi format, the question is can I copy it onto mac harddrive and import it all into Final Cut Pro? Not just that, but will it require rendering just to play the clips? Will I need to convert all the footage to .mov? Will I have to lose quality? I really am hoping that switching systems and bringing along my footage can be an easy operation, but maybe it isn't.

Thanks for your help

Final Cut Pro is typically setup for DV-NTSC, so anything not in that format will need to be rendered in order usable.

You can use QT pro or maybe even regular QT to convert it to a DV Stream and that'll import fine

Is the original footage on tapes? Could always log it, and batch capture it.

oh, good luck with switching
I made the switch about 2 years ago and it's been nothing but awesomeness. Can only imagine would a Dual 2.5 would be like

I sort of doubt that .avi can be edited directly with FCP, but I suppose it could be possible. Maybe someone with cross platform experience can shed some more light on this. I imagine it can be imported and converted as Alan describes, but that could be tedious with 200 GB.

I don't think you would want DV stream, would you? That's the format which the camera writes to tape, and it's what iMovie uses. FCP uses Quicktime files compressed with the DV codec. That would involve two format conversions which would be even more time consuming. You would want a way to go directly from the .avi to .mov files. Like Alan says, you should be able to do that with QT pro which you could download for your PC.

You also won't want to plug the PC disk directly into the Mac for editing, although it would work for file transfer. Disks formatted for the PC will mount, but performance we be poor.

Boyd, I've imported DV stream with no rendering..but doing an avi-.mov with a dv-ntsc codec might be better?

well i don't know what dv stream is exactly. My footage is dv ntsc, shot with a gl2. But sounds like it would need to be .mov to use in FCP.

Since this sounds like it's not as easy as I'd hoped, i'm either going to just use my current setup for this project, or invest in a new pc instead.

How did you get the footage onto the drive in the first place? If you have the original tapes you could recapture it but that does take time.
FCP transfers the video from the tape to the drive in the DV format or DV stream. It's not a .mov file per se and it is not re-compressed. I would try to find someone with a Mac and see if they can open the files in FCP. I have been able to use AVI's in FCP before but it depends how they were created.

If you would like to send me a sample I'll try it for you. You can email me at rhett121 at hotmail if you would like to try it and we can figure out how to transfer the footage to me.

Other than that I think you will LOVE FCP!

Thanks, but I am just going to connect my external drive to a friend's mac and copy some footage over to see if it works. I think maybe I'll just need to put it in quicktime and change it to DV stream.