Sony HDR-XR500 and Final Cut Express 4

[Huiu]

Hello there,

I would like to transfer the videos from my handicam to my Macbook Pro in the best possible quality. However, I have -- unfortunately -- no idea how to do so, which is the reason why I am here. I have:

Sony handicap HDR-XR500
Final Cut Express 4

There are two problems I encountered so far:

1. Starting Final Cut I am asked about the format (HD, NTSC, PAL), whether the videos are DV-NTSV, DV-PAL or HDV-Apple Intermediate Codec 1080i50/60, and rate 25/29.97fps. All of which I don't know.

2. It appears that the Sony HDR-XR500 is not really compatible with Mac, and on different sites it is recommended to download a variety of different programs to deal with this problem.

I would be most grateful if someone could help me with all this.

 

[priitv8]

It seems that your camera records plain standard H.264 FullHD video in MPEG-4 format. Thus nothing DV. Sony, of course, also loves to package it into AVCHD container. Both of which are no problem for Final Cut. Even the Express version.
What the program seems to ask is the format in which you want to set your project up in. With this camera, you'd want HD. PAL/NTSC depends on your camera region (Europe = PAL, Americas, Japan = NTSC).
Final Cut also will convert the video out of camera into a intermediary format (Apple Intermediate Codec) that is needed for fast editing. And once you're done, you let it export (convert) into the target format you like.
50/25 are figures for Europe (PAL) and 60/29.97 for US (NTSC). This you shall really check with your own camera, which one did you buy.

 

[Huiu]

Thank you so much!

Alas!, next problem: I connect the camera with USB, open Final Cut Express 4, File -> Log and Transfer -> Add Clip to Queue, and what I get is a white exclamation mark on a red background.

 

[priitv8]

Final Cut Express is an ancient tool I'm not sure it is capable of downloading via USB from the camera. When it was actual, FireWire was the way to go.
Perhaps you could try to import the clips from camera into computer via iMovie and go from there?

 

[Huiu]

The videos from the Sony Handicap HDR-XR500 are in AVCHD which seems to be incompatible with iMovie.

When I open the camera directly there is a file named AVCHD which is rather big (about 53GB), which are probably the videos. I copied them onto my desktop. When I try to import this file in iMovie, not all the movies from this one file are listed, some are missing. So maybe some of them are in a format which iMovie cannot deal with? All this is much too complicated for me.

 

[priitv8]

Weird. It was news back in 2013 that iMovie finally does AVCHD:
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/new-imovie-finally-supports-native-avchd-editing.1657939/