Sequence setting advice needed for editing AVIs from Canon PowerShot

I'm editing a couple of shorts using footage that I shot on a Canon PowerShot SD1100 IS in movie mode.

Quicktime identifies the clips' format as "Apple OpenDML JPEG 640 x 480, Millions"; 30FPS

The Mac's finder identifies the clips with the .AVI suffix and calls each an "AVI Movie."

Each clip opens and plays perfectly in Quicktime.

When I import the clips into FCP, they play fine in the Viewer, but always must have their video rendered once they're edited into the Timeline.

Is there a sequence preset I can select (or is there any other change I can make) that will remove the need to render each clip as I edit it into the Timeline?

My specs:
MacBook Pro 3.06GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
OS X 10.5.7
FCP 6.06

Any advice much appreciated.

well im surprised FCP accepts avi's at all. QuickTime of course, but FCP is made for mov's. Probably why it's not offering to auto-adjust the sequence settings to your source material.

Anyway, this is an old trick, pre-auto adjusting and open format sequence days.

Select the clip in the bin, right click and say make multi-clip sequence. It will now create a sequence based off your clip and place a multi-clip version of your clip in that sequence. Delete the multi-clip and then re-add your clip and it should play back fine.

Scott's workaround might be okay ? I've never used it, so I can't say ? but you'll be much less likely to encounter other problems in the future if you just batch-convert everything into a format that's known to be reliable. My default would be ProRes 422, NTSC D1, but that might not fit your needs. Once all your footage is in a known-to-be-reliable format, you should be able to get it into Final Cut Pro and work with it without any trouble at all. (Emphasis on "should."

I have to do this with my sons video camera before he can edit in iMovie. We use MPEG Streamclip to format it into a format FCP/iMovie understands.

Steve

FCPX
FCP 7.0.3
Premier CS6

MBP Retina 2.6i7 16GB / iMac 27" 3.4i7 16GB

Jeff,

What's your batch-convert method/tool of choice?

Compressor.