Editing h.264 (1280 x 720) in FCP

I'm probably going in the opposite direction of most everyone else but...

I have a new point & shoot (Canon SD 960IS) that shoots H.264 HD at 1280 x 720 30 fps. I have been able to do simple cuts and even lay text over the footage in a FCP timeline and then export it out as a h.264 QT movie. But, if I try to do any video transitions or dissolves the video around those areas acts unpredictably, jumping frames, etc.

I searched posts here and tried the proper workflow of convert to ProRes, edit, then export back to h.264 but it took a hell of a long time for each conversion (with an intel quad core tower) and I'm trying to develop a quick portable and simple workflow for video blogging. I want to shoot, load into my MBP, edit, and then upload to YouTube. (I can always shoot SD but the HD footage is really sweet for my purposes.)

I know that FCP doesn't support h.264 natively but...it seems to handle it OK in the timeline for simple edits. Does anyone know a better working method? Any hints of FCP being able to handle h.264 footage natively in the near future?

Thanks, Pons

Technically Final Cut does support native H.264 editing, through the open-format timeline feature. Technically, anything Quicktime can play back can be cut on a Final Cut timeline, with varying degrees of rendering required for real-time full-quality playback.

As you've discovered, it really doesn't work that way in practice.

The workflow you have is the objectively correct one: convert media in a non-conveniently-editable format into an intermediate format before cutting on it. The key question at this point is why it's taking you an unacceptably long time to batch-convert your H.264 media to ProRes. That's a relatively lightweight conversion process, as far as computer resources go, but it does require a significant amount of disk bandwidth to write out the ProRes media. Is it possible your conversion pipeline is I/O bound?

Since you're only going to Youtube, you might consider using DVCPRO HD as your intermediate format instead of ProRes, if ProRes requires more I/O bandwidth than your system can provide during the batch-conversion process.

Another option ? though I can't in good conscience recommend this one except as a what-the-hell experiment you might try ? is keeping all your media in H.264, but cutting it into a ProRes timeline. This workflow works very well for formats like DVCPRO HD and HDV, but I have no idea how it would work with H.264 media. Your system might not even be able to play back H.264 in a ProRes timeline in real time, which would be a total deal-breaker if it were me.

I always convert from one disk to another...they are internal disks. Could that be an I/O thing...I have no idea. Other than that i don't know why the conversion would take so long.

I'm going to try cutting H.264 in a ProRes sequence setting and see what happens.

thanks for the help.