Tuesday, May 21, 2013

Make Blackmagic Production Camera 4K footage editable in FCP 6/7/X

Videomaker's Best Camcorder of NAB 2013 is the Blackmagic Production Camera 4K. Do you know it? The team at Blackmagic Design has been hard at work preparing the release of the Blackmagic Production Camera 4K. Now, the professional has blend in our life. The Blackmagic Production Camera 4K can capture 3840×2160 on its Super 35 sensor,which can effectively retain the contents when shooting . And because the machine can use the RAW format video capture, which makes the cameraman shooting can have more space in the post-processing.




For Blackmagic Production Camera 4K users, you may want to convert the Blackmagic 4K video captured with the camera to other format files for further usage. However when you enjoy the stunning videos recorded of HD image quality, you may encounter problems of trying to edit Blackmagic 4K footage in FCP. To make 4K videos editable in FCP, we can transcode Blackmagic 4K AVCHD, MTS, M2TS, MXF, XAVC video to FCP compatible codec.

What we use: Pavtube Media Magician for Mac ($45)

This app supports a variety of codecs and file types, including AVCHD, MTS, M2TS, TOD, MOD, MKV, MOV, AVI, MP4, ASF, DVD compatible MPEG files, flash videos and even protected TiVo recordings. So it will be your ideal choice to cut/encode the Blackmagic 4K video to Apple ProRes 422 HQ which is the best codec for FCP. In case you have the same problem with importing Blackmagic 4K shootings into FCP, I'd share the workflow here.

Guide: How to Change Blackmagic 4K Video Clips to ProRes 422 HQ clips

1. Connect the Blackmagic 4K cam to Mac and the software will pop up a wizard for you to capture AVCHD, MTS, M2TS, MXF, XAVC from camcorder. This wizard is brilliant – we have used it to import many 4K videos that had not work in FCP Log and Transfer window.

 

2. Drag and drop video clips to timeline.

 

Tip: Here you can remove unwanted video clips and trim out unwanted frames by frame-accurate. Also, you may trim, cut, delete, rearrange order, and merge videos. Find some helpful instructions in below guides:

How to split/cut/trim video in frame accurate editor without re-encoding on Mac?

How to do timeline editing and select frames accurately using frame selection controller?

3. Click the Output button on the top and switch it to output interface.

Here you can set common video format like AVI, MKV, MP4, MOV, MPG, etc as well as intermediate codec for non-linear video editing app like FCP and Avid MC.



4. Export Apple ProRes video for FCP 7/FCP X.

For importing Blackmagic 4K video to FCP, follow the steps to set Apple ProRes 422 preset:



a. Move your mouse to Editor, click on the tab.

b. Select "Final Cut Pro" group.

c. The default output format for FCP is Apple ProRes 422. To use ProRes 422 HQ codec, you need to click on the "Format" bar and choose "Apple ProRes 422 HQ" from the drop-down list of.

d. Press the plus sign (+) to add task for conversion.

e. Select the task(s) and click on the triangle sign to start encoding Blackmagic 4K recordings to Apple ProRes 422 MOV for FCP.

More 4K videos:

Apart from Blackmagic Production Camera 4K, there are other video camcorders can record videos in 4K, such as Canon C500, Sony NEX-FS700, Sony PMW-F55/F5, etc. the videos formats include MXF, XAVC mainly.

So now you can successfully edit high definition videos from Blackmagic Production Camera 4K in FCP. Hope this article will be the best solution. Just enjoy your fluid workflow with Blackmagic Production Camera 4K and Final Cut Pro!