Capture in iMovie, edit in FCP

[Bob Jovi]

I've captured a couple of hours of DV footage onto my G5. I used iMovie to do this as it seemed easier than going through Final Cut. Will the DV file be the same quality regardless of which programme I use to capture?

 

[redeye be]

I think it should be.
.dv is uncompressed video saved to your HD.

I noticed no difference in quality when cutting a little movie in FC with footage from tape mixed with some captured straight to HD with iMovie.

 

[skimaxpower]

There will be no quality loss.

You need to be careful, however, with linked files. iMovie keeps things very nice and organized for you in a folder for your project. FCP is less organized. If you add the .dv files to your FCP assets, they will simply be linked to the original iMovie project folder. This is just fine, but it means that you cannot delete the iMovie project or you will lose your files.

The other option is copying/moving the .dv files to a new folder and controlling it all manually. Just be sure to keep your house in order.

 

[dolphin842]

One thing to keep in mind is that, at least from my experience, all of the DV files I've recorded in iMovie need audio rendering in order to be fully usable in Final Cut. What I do to avoid this is find the DV files within the iMovie project, then use QTAmateur to batch export the clips as a Quicktime movie using DV as the codec. Final Cut takes it just fine, then. One thing to keep in mind is that there may be very minor quality loss (I've compared frames from the original and exported DV files, and when you zoom in really far you can notice very slight degradation, but I don't think it's noticeable in regular usage). This may be due to the fact that the bitrate for iMovie DV files is a lot higher than the bitrate that Final Cut puts out (~50MB/sec vs ~30MB/sec).