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Capturing from a non-controllable device in FCP6, then moving the footage to Avid's Media Composer 3.0.5

by Kevin P McAuliffe
January 28, 2009

I received an interesting e-mail today. A Media Composer (MC) editor who reads my articles is in a bit of a bind. She recently captured 130 hours of footage into MC, and due to a bug in the software (version 3), all her footage is out of sync. To make matters worse, she purchased a non-controllable FireWire (FW) device that, of course, Media Composer does not support (story of my life). She has Final Cut Studio 2 as well, and wants to capture from the non-controllable device into Final Cut Pro, and then import all the audio from her capture’s into Media Composer and she is not sure how to do it. Let’s see if we can help her out.

I use a non-controllable FireWire device on a pretty regular basis. It’s designed to capture from a source like a VCR that only has RCA I/O’s. What the unit does is take the RCA signal (video and audio), and convert it to FW for me to capture. Any editor who works on corporate videos NEEDS a unit like this, take my word for it. Here’s the workflow I would use to get the footage into Media Composer if it did not support my device.

First, before you launch FCP, make sure the device is on, plugged in, with a signal going to your system. Next, launch Final Cut Pro, and once the program is up, navigate to your Easy Setup, and select “DV-NTSC”. Your Easy Setup (ES) will vary depending on what you are capturing.

The Easy Setup Window (this will change depending on the device you are coming from)

Something to keep in mind is that unless you have already created a custom Easy Setup, the “DV-NTSC” ES will want to control your device, but don’t worry, we’ll take care of that in a minute. Next, I would hide Final Cut Pro, and on the root of your media drive, I would create a new folder to capture your footage to. Since you are going to be deleting the footage after it has been imported into Media Composer (MC creates new media when you import footage into it), you can call the folder whatever you want. Then, in FCP, navigate to FILE>SYSTEM SETTINGS, and set the Capture Scratch to the folder you just created.

FILE>SYSTEM SETTINGS

Depending on what you are doing, you can even have FCP capture video and audio to separate files to make your life easier (if you only needed to import audio into MC, for example). Remember, though, FCP will capture the separate audio as a QuickTime audio file, not an AIFF or WAV file.

Click here to get video and audio as separate files

You are now ready to capture. Press CMD+8 to open the capture window, and if you hit play on your device, you should see and hear what’s coming from the device, but you will see this at the bottom of the capture window.

The reason you are seeing this, as I mentioned earlier, is that the “DV-NTSC” Easy Setup, assumes you want to control the device you are capturing. Since you don’t, click the “Capture Settings Tab, and select “Non-Controllable Device” from the “Device Control” drop down.

Capture Settings Tab

Now, you can navigate to the “Clip Settings” tab, and choose to capture either Video, Audio or both.

Clip Settings Tab

At this point you are ready to capture “Now”, so head back to the “Logging” window, and enter your reel name (if you have one) and the description of your clip, and hit the “Now” button to capture on-the-fly. Once all your capturing is complete, save out of Final Cut Pro, and open Media Composer. Once your project is open, right click in your bin, and select “IMPORT”.

Right click and select "IMPORT" in Avid's Media Composer

Now, simply navigate to where you had captured the FCP media, select the files you want, and click “IMPORT”. Now, depending on what you captured, we’ll use DV video and audio as an example, you will have to wait while MC converts the file from a standard DV file, to one with the Avid Codec. Obviously, if you want to capture both video and audio into MC, don’t have Final Cut capture them as separate files.

Avid Media Composer's Import window

That’s it. Once the import is done, you can playback your footage, drop it into your timeline, and edit away. Here’s a screen grab of a DV clip I captured on-the-fly iin Final Cut Pro, and imported into Avid. Quick and easy!

A DV file captured in Final Cut Pro 6, and imported into Avid's Media Composer 3.0.5

One last thing that I want to mention is that there is a faster way to move media over to the Avid from Final Cut Pro, and that is using Automatic Duck’s Pro Export 4 for Final Cut Pro. It is more designed for moving finished sequences to an Avid to do things like color correction, or a final output you can find out more information on Automatic Duck’s Pro Export 4 for Final Cut Pro by clicking here, and keep an eye out for a tutorial where I will show you how easy it is to move a project from one platform (FCP) to another (Avid).