I recently stumbled over a video that will change my video workflow. I have from time to time tried to put Quicktime movies into Final cut only to get “the red line of death” above the clip in the multitrack editing window. I have run across other formats that do the same thing. Essentially what is happening is that Final Cut wants to render these files before you can do anything with them. The only problem is that it can take anywhere from several minutes to several hours to render these files. Then as soon as you want to cut or splice or do anything with the clip, Final Cut asks you to re-render the file. It blows!
This clip shares a method and some software to help with this issue. Check out How To Use The Zi8 With Final Cut Express on Youtube. Very informative video. The freeware MPEG Streamclip from Squared 5 software works awesome! This video post uses this method to convert files so they need no rendering in Final Cut from the Kodak Zi8 camera, but I think this will work great for all those other clips that just don’t want to cooperate as well.
Let me know what you think?