FCP vs Prem Pro capturing
 

The weekend I got a simple little job - capture 25 minutes worth of 720P30 from another HD100 ( I assume ).

well the tapes where *loaded* with drop outs. the first tape had a defect section 5 minutes in and contaminated the rest of the first tape, and the second tape. the second tape after about 6 passes finally got wiped fairly clean, but the first tape continued to have problems.

anyways, FCP just barfed on the footage. it would capture 10 secs, stop for 5secs, then capture another 10 secs. worthless, totally worthless. Opened up Prem Pro 2 on the PC and capture the whole tape, drop outs and all right over the camera start/stops.

Its FCP thats the problem, period. if PP can capture it, FCP should as well. Of course my Kona card also decided to give me problems when I tried a analog component HD capture, but thats entirely another story....

another note - on a couple of captures in Prem Pro, audio went out of sync. It appears that the huge drop outs on these tapes caused PP to do something weird. THe audio plays ok for a while, then it went out after some massive drop outs. I finally got a tolerable capture. so after all that, did I say that the shooting & audio were bad ?


Steve Oakley

Hi Steve,

Have you tried to capture yet with Cineforms AspectHD?
You can download the trial at www.cineform.com. Capture with the HDlink tool, not Premiere Pro.
You can set to capture only m2t files or to convert to Cineform AVI which work strait and fast in Premiere Pro.

Cineform is great and I use it for everything but if there are errors in the stream then Cineform will also show the audio sync issues.

I agree with Mark, Cineform.

I have gotten the same resluts from both NLE's on a few tapes, ended up using Cineforms Utility stand alone for catpure on the XP side of the system, with better results. Not perfect, but "blood pressure lower" kind of better.

How far off is the sync on the worse one?

I was able to capture with DVHS... go figure. even with some horrific dropouts that caused 1/2 the picture to break up, audio ran in sync. I then used mpegstream clip to output QT's. on tape worked ok, the other didn't. it had the worst of the drop outs. even using mpegstream clips "fix data breaks" pref, it failed to give me a good QT. only thing it did was take forever - I mean over an hour for a 15 minute clip. bottom line is I handed back the raw mpeg2 captures and some one will try vegas and procoder to spit out QT's.

I'll look into cineform as well, but the bottom line is apple needs to fix the problems in 5.1 before they ship 6, they owe us a functional version.

as for the sync, it went out seconds. I'm guessing every big dropout put it off one GOP at a time. weird the raw captures worked ok though, and played back ok, but FCP and PP captures had problems.

Steve Oakley

Jesus, what tapes were you using?

It sounds like for whatever reason, bad timecode is prohibiting you from capturing your fooage properly. But just out of curiosit, IF you did not need the timecode off the tape (ie for a later re-capture / match up etc.) Would dubbing the tape, say firewire to firewire, and assigning a fresh new timecode on the new tape fix the problem?

MK

I've been having the same issue with a set of tapes in FCP, getting ready to try iMovie and/or Premiere Pro to get the footage off the tape. The dubbing idea is good one though, I never think of doing that. Thanks MK for the idea (even though it wasn't meant for me initially).

Also glad to know I'm not the only one that has these issues with FCP sometimes.

Apple has a lot of work to do and needs to fix this asap.

I did not use them some one else - Fuji in white shells. looked like pro dv grade tape


Steve Oakley