Camera to Final Cut Express - Memory Issue

[--Rei]

Alrighty, if anyone can help me with this it would be amazing.

I have a Canon Vixia HFR10. I record everything in standard play. According to the camera guide, 2h and 20m worth of footage will amount to 8 GB total.

Yet, when I transfer footage to Final Cut Express, it takes up...needless to say, a lot more than that. One 33-second clip took up 0.3 GB. One less than 5-minute project took up a few gigabytes by itself.

I'm working on a massive 42-page script, and we're filming it now. I don't want to upload ALL that footage until I fix this memory issue. Is there an option here I'm missing that would make memory reasonable?

ALSO: In a Final Cut Express project, all done, if I deleted the clips from their bins, would the project itself crumble and not work? I'm thinking space. Thanks again!

 

[martinX]

The camera records in AVCHD format, which is a video format with interframe compression. When you bring it into FCE, you transcode it into AIC (Apple Intermediate Codec) which has no interframe compression. The plus of this that you end up with video that is easier for editing since every frame is an actual frame. When you cut (or anything else) the operation is carried out on a real frame rather than having to reconstruct the frames on the fly and then carry out the edit.

The minus is mega file size.
I'm looking at 20 minutes of HD footage transcoded to AIC in front of me and it's near enough to 20GB, so if I had 2 h 20 minutes I'd be looking at 160GB. Don't forget to backup.

2h 20 minutes is a lot of footage to edit. May I suggest you familiarise yourself with how FCE (and FCP) acquires and stores footage. Larry Jordan's article is a good place to start. Shane Ross has a series of tutorials for $50, though it's geared towards documentaries.