Retreiving video from a server

I use fcphd 4.5, I have a g4 power book with external drive. I did an edit for someone this week and downloaded the video clips from a server. They used a sony sr82 hard drive camcorder. The video operator up loaded video to a server, I retrieved it and found it very difficult to manipulate the clips when they were in the time line for final editing.
I would need to render all clips with the slightest adjustment.
I know I am doing something wrong, I just dont know what it is. The sony camera is also not mac compatable.
Please help for next time
mike caffrey

Select the clip in FCP and press APPLE-9 to check the formatting. Chances are it will be in some compressed crappy format. You may want to consider using QuickTime Player or MPEG Streamclip to convert it to a higher, editing-friendly format that matches the rest of the edit (eg. Uncompressed SD, DV NTSC). It's the only way to avoid rendering. Remember, every single setting has to match or it's render time.


www.derekmok.com

Thanks for the quick response, but if i may be so naive can you walk me through uncompressing a clip in quick time pro. I am having a block.thanks

Thanks for the quick response, but if i may be so naive can you walk me through uncompressing a clip in quick time pro. I am having a block.thanks

There's no such thing as "uncompressing" or "decompressing". If the clip you downloaded has already been compressed (eg. for the web -- my worst nightmare, when I cut a bunch of spots for a major electronics company and they gave me a bunch of WMVs at 320x240 with "'30s horror film" sound), the video quality has already been lost. Think of it this way. You have a gorgeous statue. In order to fit it into your suitcase, you chopped it in half and left everything above the waist in Italy. You get back to America and now you have all the room you want. So you stick the statue into a bigger container (a higher codec) because you need to have everything in your house (your timeline) in a certain container.

The container may be huge in itself, but the content therein is still gonna look like an ass and a pair of legs! You left the torso, head and arms in Italy and you will never get it back...unless you go back to Italy and transport the entire statue, intact, back to your house. And if you didn't make a backup of that intact statue in the first place, you're screwed, Krazy Glue ain't gonna do it.

If you do need to make a crappy clip fit into your timeline codec, use either QuickTime Player or MPEG Streamclip, go to Export, choose the settings that fit your timeline. At least there will be no more rendering, but it will still look as bad as the compressed clip, and your file sizes will balloon.


www.derekmok.com