Heads Up On Canon vid DSLR Final Cut Plug-In

I do not recall seeing a post about this, so I figured I would give a quick heads up to those who are using Log and Transfer via the Canon Plug-In where it may bite you.

To work in Final Cut, the video needs to be transferred to another codec and Canon came out with the plug-in awhile back which allows the cards to be read into Final Cut and logged. Very nice, keeps the timecode so you can easily know which clips were shot at what time, which is helpful when shooting multiple cameras in particular.

But there are a couple of gotchas. Broad stroke - the first is that the Plug-In may not import the entire clip, though it is reported as fully bought in. For example, a 5 minute clip may wind up being 1 minute when it is done processing, though the logging window has the actual running time. The second is that if you try to re-import the failed clips, the numbers change on the re-imported clip.

Not a big deal if there are not many clips and you can check them. But if you have alot to import, it can be a PITA. There are some suggestions on how to avoid the issue, such as by making sure that you mark in/out points or change certain preferences, but they did not work for me. Real bummer.

Have you updated to V1.1? That came out last month I think.

@ the FCPUG, there were some people experiencing this problem. All were importing many clips and the issue was repeatable. We couldn't fix the issue. The other issue of clip renaming also came up. That was with v1.0 not the latest.

I now use 5DtoRGB. Better quality, albeit very slow!

Have you updated to V1.1? That came out last month I think.

Did that download, though it was strange - I downloaded it a couple of times to make sure I got the right one. The name was correct (V1.1.) from the Canon site and said it was the September2010 release, though when unzipped the application itself showed a created and last modified date of August 2009.

@ the FCPUG, there were some people experiencing this problem. All were importing many clips and the issue was repeatable. We couldn't fix the issue. The other issue of clip renaming also came up. That was with v1.0 not the latest.

 

I now use 5DtoRGB. Better quality, albeit very slow!

The new plug-in seems to have the same issue. At some point I may go back and try it again to see if I can get it going/clear things out. Right now I am going with the timecodes from the clips that worked and whichever clips were missing/appear to be short I will grab MPEG Streamclip versions. Downloaded the 5DtoRGB convertor. Looks good, though I did not see an easy batch set-up. With the number of clips I am converting (couple of hundred) that would be a big plus. Going to use that though in the future on smaller projects since you mentioned you liked the 5DtoRGB quality in the past also.

Still easier than tape though

Just use several instances of 5D2RGB. It uses 1-2 cores only. Or you could try Magic Bullet Grinder, which conforms to 24p while transcoding with timecode. Only problem is that it's glacial.

If you are getting errors reimporting, try trashing the cache data of L&T. That should toss out the memory of the import so you can redo that without the rename issue. At least it worked a few months back.

As for the update, the installer always shows the date when it was created. It's the data inside that would show actual dates added. Check the contents. Welcome to Unix file dating.