Here I was so happy to finally being able to install a real non-linear editor (NLE) for video and with the $100 iPhone early adopter rebate I snatched up a fresh copy of Final Cut Express HD 3.5. I installed it, salivated through the tutorial DVD, and played around with the copious loops and titling options.
And then my pain began.
Firstly, I opened up FCE and then tried importing a bunch of my movie files from iPhoto. After all, iMovie was able to use them fine so FCE should be even better. Right? Um … er … no. FCE apparenly only works with DV and HDV video files. That means while it is possible to preview your files from your digital camera or SD camcorder you’re really up a creek when it comes to editing with them. Bagelturf wrote an extensive article on converting digital camera movie files to FCE formats. It’s not pretty but it seems to work.
OK, so I downloaded Squared 5’s Streamclip which looks to be the right converter software and I rerendered some of my video files as DV files. Yay. But now when I try to open up FCE it won’t load at all! It just initializes then quits.
Ugh! $300 and it’s that unstable? C’mon!
So, I’ve been reading tips on how to remove your FCE preferences, but the funny thing is that I don’t seem to have any of those preferences files there! I mean, really, where the heck did all those preferences files go!
As you can tell, I’m a little upset at the moment. When I actually pay for software I expect it to work. Maybe not perfectly, but at least it should -load-.
OK, so I followed FCPBook’s instructions and I finally got the interface to load up! Just to summarize:
- Quit FCE
- Remove your com.apple.FinalCut*.plist files from your Home/Library/Preferences folder
- Remove the Final Cut Prefs, Obj Cache, and Prof Cache files from within the Final Cut user data folders
- Repair any disk permissions with Disk Utility
I loaded a converted DV clip into FCE HD 3.5 and it plays now! Yay! But … the audio is now incompatible!!! It just goes beep-beep-beep-beep. Ugh.
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Update at 2:36 AM:
After a couple hours of fiddling around and reading various websites I think I finally have this solved. I used the Easy Setup and chose “HDV-Apple Intermediate Codec 720p30″, “Unlimited RT”, “Low” video quality, “Dynamic” framerate. You can import just about any video clip in but since the frame size is 720×480 this means you end up losing a little bit of your video if you recorded at 640×480. Once you load your clips in, select them and view their Item Properties. The Pixel Aspect needs to be changed to “NTSC – CCIR 601″ or whatever your Sequence’s aspect settings are—hold down Ctrl while clicking to bring up the dropdown menu to change this. Finally, if you use the “Image + Wireframe” View option then you will have some resizing handles on the clip which you can use to enlarge the clip so it fills the entire frame.