FCP Not Importing Audio with HDV
 

Hi,

When I import an mpg2 clip, FCP doesn't bring in the audio.

I captured the data from my HD100 (720p24) to a PC with dvhsCap, converted it into an mpeg2 file (.mpg) with MPEG Streamclip and then copied the file to the mac. I then tried to import the file to FCP 5.1.2. The video comes over fine, but doesn't have any audio tracks.

I then converted the mpg data on the mac with MPEG Streamclip into a quicktime file (.mov) and then imported that file into FCP. The converted file came in with audio.

Any thoughts?

Thanks,
-Joe

Hi Joe.

Your files captured with DVHSCap should already be MPEG-2 Transport Stream (.m2t files).

Converting them to MPEG-2 files (when they were already MPEG-2 in the first place) seems an unnecessary step and is probably the source of your audio problems.

The only thing I'm not 100% sure about is the fact that you captured on a PC. But if those captured files have the extension ".m2t", then you should just copy the .m2t files straight over to the Mac, then use MPEG Streamclip only once to convert the .m2t files into Quicktimes (which FCP can then work with). And remember that MPEG Streamclip can give you a choice of codecs (AIC, DVCPRO HD, Uncompressed, HDV, etc.) to use when creating your Quicktimes. I don't advise encoding again with HDV (when making the Quicktime movies) because it adds an extra MPEG-2 compression step which can result in image degradation.

Thanks David,

I thought that FCP could handle .mpg files natively. So I used Streamclip to convert the files from mpeg transport streams (.m2t) into mpeg program streams (.mpg). I believe that Streamclip does this just by changing the package, but without any decompression or compression. Saving it as a .mov QuickTime file, I think, always involves the extra compression when it's moved into the new codec. In addition, since changing to a .mov involves a new codec, it's very slow and I am working with over 100 hours of video.

I would like to just bring an mpeg program stream file into FCP and start to edit it. I can view the pictures (which is the hard part). I'm just not getting the audio tracks.

Thanks,
-Joe