Hello, i could use some help regarding video shot from a variety of sources, which i'd like to bring all together and edit on Final Cut Pro 6, ultimately output and compressed to a few different formats: quicktime H264 for my own website (and for iPod), flash for YouTube, and then of course the ability to burn to DVD in high quality. The output/compression shouldn't be a problem for me. Its the choice of codec for importing and working with multiple sources that seems confounding (!)... wanting to maintain decent quality without too many rendering stages, and not bogging down the computer...
my multiple sources include: - Canon HV30 mini-DV camcorder, shooting in either HD or DV mode - Sony TRV950 mini-DV camcorder in DV mode - shooting blog-type video in Quicktime from my Apple MacBook's internal camera, which uses h264 640x480 millions 16.7 FPS / AAC stereo 44.1 - capturing to disk from Wirecast video streaming software, which uses a strange codec suffix i've never seen before "f4v", but it think its also h264.. and the highest-quality option i could choose came out as 720x540 millions 22.1 FPS / AAC stereo 44.1 (wondering where these arbitrary frame per second rates come from?) - a friend's portable video camera which puts out "Apple MPEG-2 SD Camcorder Video 720x576 (1024x576) 16-bit Little Endian 48k"... (pretty low quality) I'd imagine that i have to pick one codec to edit with and then batch- process all my clips ahead of time, and then import them into FCP. I have a recent MacBook Pro 2.93ghz and firewire 800 hard drives, so processing power is probably not too much of an issue; however, HD footage probably only makes up 25% of my clips, so i don't think its necessary to choose HD as my codec of choice (as it tends to take quite a while to render!)... Any suggestions? Part 2: Sometimes i'd like to simply edit the Quicktime/Macbook or Wirecast H264 video all by itself, within its native codec, so there's less chance of loss (and less time converting files). Using Final Cut 6, when you drag a captured clip into a sequence, it 'sometimes' prompts you to see if you want to change the sequence settings to that of the clip... cool... but: for some reason it still often requires a rending stage, and its usually the audio.... weird... why? is AAC a problem? also, sometimes the imported movie has serious audio drift, which gets worse the later you go in the file...and so it doesn't appear like an easy shift would fix it. Any idea what's going on here? Thanks in advance for any help, suggestions or links Greg [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
