Jacques E. Bouchard
December 27th, 2010, 10:16 AM
I've been wrestling for a while now with the problem of capturing HDV on a PC (I use Vegas and Premiere Pro) and delivering the footage to a client who wants to edit in Final Cut Pro. Thanks to Mac Drive, I have no problems reading, formatting and writing to external Mac drives to deliver large amounts of HDV footage, but FCP is notorious for choking on m2t files.
When I scoured Google for solutions, most everyone recommended re-compressing to Quicktime, seemingly without a care for generational loss and the extremely time-consuming process of handling several hours of footage, not to mention losing the original timecode (and this from self-proclaimed professionals who really should know better).
One viable solution that I found until now was using ClipWrap, which rewraps m2t files into a Quicktime container, even preserving the timecode. But it only runs on Macs, and that would require the client to install the software on their computer, which was awkward at best.
Another solution that I've recently tested is demuxing the footage in MPEG Streamclip into unscaled m2v and aiff streams. FCP loads them without a problem, but the original timecode seems to be lost. Still, unless you install a Mac emulator on your PC, it's the best solution.
So, for anyone else faced by the technical challenge of delivering m2t footage to a client editing on a Mac, the best solution seems to be demuxing into unscaled m2v and aiff using MPEG Streamclip. No recompression, no generational loss, and it only takes a few minutes.
I'm hoping this post will show up in Google hits. It would have saved me a few hours of searching.
When I scoured Google for solutions, most everyone recommended re-compressing to Quicktime, seemingly without a care for generational loss and the extremely time-consuming process of handling several hours of footage, not to mention losing the original timecode (and this from self-proclaimed professionals who really should know better).
One viable solution that I found until now was using ClipWrap, which rewraps m2t files into a Quicktime container, even preserving the timecode. But it only runs on Macs, and that would require the client to install the software on their computer, which was awkward at best.
Another solution that I've recently tested is demuxing the footage in MPEG Streamclip into unscaled m2v and aiff streams. FCP loads them without a problem, but the original timecode seems to be lost. Still, unless you install a Mac emulator on your PC, it's the best solution.
So, for anyone else faced by the technical challenge of delivering m2t footage to a client editing on a Mac, the best solution seems to be demuxing into unscaled m2v and aiff using MPEG Streamclip. No recompression, no generational loss, and it only takes a few minutes.
I'm hoping this post will show up in Google hits. It would have saved me a few hours of searching.