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waloshin

macrumors 68040
Original poster
Oct 9, 2008
3,339
173
When capturing analogue video for editing in fcpx would I be better capturing in mpeg or .avi?

I will be using a Ati 650 USB.
 

joema2

macrumors 68000
Sep 3, 2013
1,645
864
When capturing analogue video for editing in fcpx would I be better capturing in mpeg or .avi?

I will be using a Ati 650 USB.

In general I would say mpeg, which is often a file with a .mp4 extension, encoded as H.264. However there is a difference between the container file format and the codec used.

However the capture software determines what encoding format, such as a dedicated capture utility or an editor like FCPX. It is a good idea capture a brief section, then inspect the file's characteristics (bit rate, resolution, etc) plus how it plays, before capturing a lot of material. This is because tape must be captured in real time, so any mistake or suboptimal capture settings will require recapturing the entire tape.

If the capture software gives you a range of options on bitrate and codecs, you might need to test several of them. In some cases capturing at a very high bitrate or using a low-compression codec might be theoretically better but it doesn't result in any visible difference yet eats up a lot of disk space.

A good free utility to inspect the file characteristics is MediaInfo: https://itunes.apple.com/app/mediainfo/id510620098
Invisor is a little better but it costs $2.99: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/invisor-media-file-inspector/id442947586?mt=12

This is a good brief video which explains video codec vs. container differences:

This web page summarizes them: http://projects.lowtech.org/openmovies/codec.html
 

mBox

macrumors 68020
Jun 26, 2002
2,357
84
I want to say neither.
I would need more info as to what MPEG flavor you are faced with.
I had an Perception PVR years ago in a Windows XP box that captured both Uncompressed AVI and sequential TGAs.
That would have been a better format but that was the old SD days.
There are some decent MPEG2 capture cards that might do the trick.
 

mabok

macrumors member
Jan 9, 2012
61
28
Whenever I receive footages, I would usually log it (read: convert) to ProRes 422 or ProRes 422(proxy)... so I can edit it with ease.

Whenever I receive audio.. I would comvert it to Wav.
 

Unami

macrumors 65816
Jul 27, 2010
1,351
1,556
Austria
.mpeg .avi are containers - mpeg usually contains mpeg-1 or mpeg-2 files, . avi contains a wide variety of codecs. afaik, fcpx does not import from .avi containers, so i'd use .mpeg with a bitrate of 35.000 kbit for analogue video. if there's a prores422-option, i'd use that for editing files in fcpx.

not sure, but isn't it still possible to capture in fcpx? you can also use the .dv codec (fcpx, quicktime, imovie,...), depending on the source of your footage (e.g. if it's vhs, is should be more than enough)
 
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