Vegas m2t won't work with FCP - Why?

Dach wrote on 7/10/2007, 6:00 AM

I have been working with someone who asked me to download HDV footage that was shot from a Canon HV20. I used Vegas to put it into the system and create m2t files.

The files were transferred over to a external hard drive and this person is now attempting to import them into FCP 5.1. He is saying that it is not working. I am not familiar with the FCP programs.

Does anyone have any explanation as to why this may be happening?

Thanks,

Chad

Comments

rs170a wrote on 7/10/2007, 6:54 AM

The short answer is it can't be done :-(
Here's the long answer, courtesy of Mike Jones from a thread on the DMN Vegas forum.

The problem is FCP and the way it interprets, uses and accesses video files. By either flaw or design FCP does like to use native HDV files in their m2t wrapper which is the HDV native state. FCP does indeed edit 'native hdv' and can even use its own m2t wrapper technically but on capture it FCP adds its own flavouring to the file and this manifests as problem in two ways. a) That most often files captured on FCP Cannot be used or read by any other NLE. And b) that files captured on any other NLE cannot be read by FCP. Nothing to do with the OS, it about how FCP is directed to read files.

The very cynical part of me says this is deliberate in the design of FCP to keep it's users insular the FCP environment. Because if its not that, then its just very sloppy software design as native HDV m2t files captured, as Spot said, by Vegas, Prmeiere, Liquid, Avid, Edius et al, have no problem swapping m2t files regardless of OS.

As I said, the problem is not the Mac OS, nor is it in any way a flaw in how Vegas captures native HDV; but rather directly a flaw of FCP. The sad truth is that if you want to work on FCP you have to capture and finish in FCP because importing is an issue if captured elsewhere, exporting is an issue because of strange FCP meta in the files, and FCP has poor to non-existent support for open frameworks such as AAF which Avid, Premiere, Vegas, Edius, Speed Edit and Liquid all utilise perfectly. I regularly move projects and their media files in AAF format between vegas, Premiere and Even AVid with not an issue. But not to FCP....

(another) Mike

farss wrote on 7/10/2007, 8:40 AM

I don't remember where I read this.

It seems a lot of the problems goe back to when Macromedia wrote FCP. They never fully integrated Quicktime into FCP so all manner of workarounds are used in the code instead of Apple rewriting the core code.
Even harder to believe is that the QT pipeline is only 8 bits which might explain the issues with FCP and 10bit workflows.

Bob.

Dach wrote on 7/10/2007, 1:32 PM

Thanks for the explanation. This is unfortunate for our work flow, but as mentioned there is no way around it. Nice explanation Mike.

Chad

Spot|DSE wrote on 7/10/2007, 2:18 PM

While at this point it seems to be clear that Apple has made it proprietary, it also allows them to optimize for certain uses. By being less open-ended, it allows them to control the environment, which for example, Vegas cannot/does not do. Either direction has drawbacks/benefits. I find I'd rather have an open-ended environment that allows me to do whatever I need to do 95% of the time with some small issues of "Darn, wish I could do this easier" vs having to conform everything to a set value before beginning work. Many tools conform on the fly, and there are indeed some benefits to this, specifically hardware bene's...but it's generally a PITA, IMO.
Apple likely could fairly easily make things more open now that they're using Intel, but why should they? Apple has always been an island of exclusive, and rather than becoming inclusive, they're growing their island.