FCP Log and Transfer @ 720p

[tabasco70]

Hi,
I use a Canon HF21 camera, which records in AVCHD format.
I use Final Cut Pro to edit. So far, I've been using Log and Transfer to import my videos and edit them, which has been fine.
However, I am starting a longer project and my computer cannot handle the large amounts of 1080 videos.
Thus, I want to get my videos as 720p instead, so editing will be easier.
How can I do this?
Thanks

 

[CaptainChunk]

Welcome to digital video. If available space is your principal concern, hard drives are quite cheap these days. Even standard DV chews up 13GB per hour because of its relatively low level of compression, versus newer, more space-efficient consumer HD codecs like AVCHD. But once video gets ingested into Final Cut, it becomes 10x the size, as you probably noticed, because ProRes sacrifices space efficiency for speed.

Unless there's an actual setting on your camera to record video in 720p (1280x720) resolution, you'll generally have to re-encode it to a smaller frame size after ingesting it with Log and Transfer. Log and Transfer will always ingest video in its original recorded form and transcode it into an editable format. In your case, that's probably ProRes 422. If you have the initial space to spare, you can use Compressor or Quicktime Conversion within FCP to reframe everything as 1280x720 and retain decent quality.

But something tells me that the camera will have two video recording modes: HD or SD - and you wouldn't be able to change the default resolution (1920x1080, presumably - versus 720x480 anamorphic).