Flip to FCPX

My girlfriend has been given a Flip camera and we've been having fun shooting stuff of our 14 month old daughter. It seems like a good time to give FCPX a go but when i try to import the options are greyed out. I had a look at the "supported cameras" page and no sign of the Flip. What's the best way to get this stuff into FCPX?

Cheers

Dom

Both import file and import from camera are grayed out?
Camera hooked up by USB?
Do you see it mounted on the desktop?
Are the files contained in a folder structure and have you tried pointing import from camera at that folder structure?
Are the files .mts or .mp4?

Recently I've worked on projects with AVCHD which had no problem when pointed import form camera at the parent folder structure but when the camera op had a bunch of raw .mts files, they were grayed with import files so I had to transcode to ProRes externally. In another case I had to use H.264 .mp4 files and they imported just fine using import files.

Thanks Craig. Have to go out now but will check your suggestions later and get back. Thanks again. D

Ok, Thanks Craig, seems to be all working now. A bit of fresh air and it worked out fine. Operator error presumably.

Unfortunately more than half of the clips do not have the purple line running through them, and will not play at all. I can right click on them and reveal them in the finder on my 2nd drive, and play them in Qtime from there, but FCPX will only show me a still of the first frame even though the playhead is running. Any thoughts?

Hi Dom,

might i suggest that you pre-transcode your Flip files before you import them into FCP X.

I'm not sure what codec the Flip records to but there are lots of, mostly free, transcoders such as MPEG Steamclip to turn your files into
Pro-Res 422 ( or Pro-Res 422 L )

You can then import these files with all the checkboxes unchecked, referencing the files, and choose on a clip by clip basis whether you want to stabilise or
colour correct the clips.

By it's very nature Flip footage will be mostly handheld and very shaky and I think that might have caused you problems.

good luck

Thanks for that Mark. In the end i took the clips i'd transcoded and imported them into a new project and so far so good. It's amazing how good much of this Flip stuff looks considering how much the camera costs.

My only gripe is i now have 2 projects with the same footage, and when i right click on the new one and try to consolidate it there is no option to do it. Anyway, this is my first foray into this program after many years with the Legacy version (don't you hate that term?) so i'll have to see how it goes.

Consolidate in FCPX only means that the media will be copied to one spot: The event folder for the drive it's on. If its already all there, you won't be given the option. If you have 2 projects with the same media, you could probably just delete one of them (presumably the one that had non-working files).

Andy