Editing DSLR video in Final Cut Express

I recently upgraded to a Nikon D7000 and began shooting HD video with it, but ran into a problem with importing the video into Final Cut Express (FCE): every time I made a minor edit on the timeline I had to do a complete rendering which ran very slowly. I found some discussions about this in several places on the web so I thought I would post a solution here that’s worked well for me. I can’t say for sure whether this will help with all DSLRs, so to be clear here’s what I’m using:

  • Nikon D7000
  • Shooting 720p30 HD (produces a .MOV file)
  • Importing into Final Cut Express HD 3.5

The challenge here, I think, is the MOV container that the camera generates—this format doesn’t lend itself to editing, so I did a conversion to the video files using the free MPEG Streamclip tool and had much better results with quick rendering on the FCE timeline.

* Note that what I’m describing here applies to Final Cut Express. If you’re using Final Cut Pro you should have the ProRes codecs installed and you can convert your MOV files using the ProRes 422 codec to get the same results. I don’t know about the other NLEs like Premier or Avid as my experience is limited to FCE.

The process is basically this:

  • Import the MOV files from the camera to a folder on your computer.
  • Open MPEG Streamclip and drag the first MOV file onto the canvas (or do File > Open Files…)
  • Go to File > Export to Quicktime… and select the options as shown on the screen shot below (the Apple Intermediate Codec is the important thing here to get your video into a timeline-friendly format).
  • Click Make Movie and save the converted file—I save mine in the same folder as the original MOV files but add “-aic” to the file name (like D7K_1234-aic.mov).
  • Bring these converted files into FCE and edit as usual.

When I did it this way the occasional rendering on the timeline went really quickly, and I can’t detect a noticeable change in video quality.

Posted: March 14th, 2011
Filed under: Free (or low-cost), Tips, Video Tags: , | No Comments »

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