Oh PLEASE, oh PLEASE NO!

Well,
Here are the two responses that I got to my tech question, posed on the Apple FCP Basics forum on the great site Creative Cow (.com).  The first is scary because he does kind of say that he thinks I'm going to have to

Re-Edit Everything

but then he sort of back-peddles in a way that gave me hope.  

The second one makes it sound like this will be 

Absolutely No Sweat -- BUT

then when I tried to do what he said, uh, my computer wouldn't let me.  So I need to poke around with that for a bit.

I am not going to freak out 

YET.

I am going to assume there is a solution which will not mean that I have to 

Re-Edit Everything.

o.
m.
g.

Re: Should I be worried?? (importing not capturing .avi files) by Shane Ross on Jul 25, 2012 at 1:56:39 pm

OK...at first I didn't have the heart to answer, but I see that no one else is, so...

FCP doesn't work with AVI files well. It isn't designed to edit them. And the footage might be interlaced...DV is an interlaced medium. But if it was captured on another system and just imported as AVI, the interlacing might not display properly on your system. The idea situation is to capture the tapes on the system you intend to edit it with.

The solution, to get the best quality out of this, would be to recapture the footage on your system. But the issue with that is, well, will the timecode match the AVI files? If you could capture exactly the same way they were on the other system, you could capture the footage in another project, make sure the names are exactly the same as the other files you received...and then try to reconnect to the new media. But the issue with that is that the timecode would need to match exactly, the start and end times of the captures would have to match exactly, and the duration would have to match exactly. Not promising.

But, you said the quality of the footage was fine...so that's seems to be OK...you can work with this. The only issue is that your DVDs are squeezed, meaning they are in CINEMASCOPE (anamorphic) but the TV lacks the ability to unsqueeze it. Older non-HDTVs have problems doing this, where HDTVs do it all the time. YOu need to burn a DVD that is letterboxed, not anamorphic. If I knew iDVD I'd tell you how, but I don't, so you need to see if you can find settings to do that.

All doesn't seem lost. The situation wasn't ideal, but you might be able to save things.

Good luck.

Shane
Little Frog Post
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def

Re: Should I be worried?? (importing not capturing .avi files) by Rafael Amador on Jul 28, 2012 at 6:55:25 pm

If the footage has been captured from a DV tape, it doesn´t matter if is AVI or QT, will be Interlaced Lower First.
[Rachel Adams] " am I going to have to GO BACK and CAPTURE ALL THESE HUNDREDS of clips now to ensure that?"
No need to recapture, just rewrap the AVI as QT and this is very easy. Open the clips with QT Player and "Save as..".
The new files will be QT instead of AVI and will contain all the original Audio, Video and TC.
rafael

http://www.nagavideo.com