Hi all. Got a couple of new Canon camcorders, and am planning to do some recording of a course I will be teaching soon. The camcorders are tapeless AVCHD type. I have FCE 4. Am planning on eventually getting Final Cut Pro X. I've been doing a bit of reading about the conversion of AVCHD required for FCE, and the files grow to 10 times their original size. Wow. Been looking around a bit to see what the situation is with Final Cut Pro X. Is it better? I would assume it would have better support for AVCHD, but thought I'd check you you guys. Thanks in advance.

I know nothing about video editing, but I do know that you can get a 30-day free trial of FCPX.

http://www.apple.com/finalcutpro/trial/

Yes. Thanks for reminding me of that, Michael. What with the nice update they just gave for FCP, I'm probably going to give this trial a shot.

FCPX will let you work on reduced size video (for improved performance) and then render from your original video. I've played with it a little (I edit about 3-4 hours of raw video of my lectures per week, I teach in the evenings) but actually found I can work faster with iMovie! Only feature that I miss in iMovie is the new multicam support of FCPX. In my case, my speed is the most important criteria.

Thanks, Talmy. I just did a little experiment with my new tapeless camcorder. Imported into FCE4 an hour of video shot at what Canon calls FXP, which is the second highest quality available, and with a frame rate of 30 per second (but recorded at 60i, so not true 30 per second?). Took 46 GB. That's kind of a lot. Going to download the trail of FCPX and see how that handles AVCHD from the Canon.

Wow! Imported the same one hour clip into my trial version of FCPX. Import was way quicker (looks like it's rendering in the background, but lets me get right at editing) AND (here's the shocker), the clip that took just over 44 GB in FCE4 (I was slightly off in earlier post) takes just under 8 GB in FCPX. Different codec makes such a difference!

It seems you got it what you wanted, but just for information.
Final Cut Pro X supports AVCHD natively, for better performance you want to optimize your footage and maybe even go with Proxy which in your case I don't think there is a need.

Happy editing!

Thanks Scrubelicious. Yes, I've been looking into this optimized footage and proxy thing. It winds up taking up a lot of HD space, but I think it may be unavoidable with some of the multicam clips I'll be working with.

How does your setup look like at the moment?

I'm going to be filming with 4 or 5 cameras about 30 hours of classroom footage (so 4 or 5 multiplied by 30 hours), so it will require a lot of HD space. I will be on the road, and will be daily archiving the SD cards from the video cameras onto a USB external HD with my MacBook Air. When I get back home, I will capture chunks of the course from those archives onto a Firewire 800 drive using the MacBook Air and Apple Cinema Display (which is what will allow me to use a Firewire port). I will edit those chunks on that drive, later archiving projects onto a USB drive. At some point, I'd like to get an iMac rather than edit on the MacBook Air. I am waiting for the new iMac to come out. Maybe at the June WWDC?

I am jealous of your multiple camera set up. I look like some sort of joke running around the classroom! I luckily can get most of my lecture via screen capture, but I also use a Flip camera I turn on and off if I need to use the whiteboard and occasionally the built-in camera in my MacBook Pro. I put marks on the board to show the extent of the capture and reposition the camera manually if I need more board. Even so my students love the videos for reviewing the material. I don't sell them (nor do I get paid to even make the videos in the first place), so don't really need super quality, but they are decent 780P videos.

In Tokyo now, watching the sun rise over the city from my hotel room, cameras scattered all over the bed. Making notes on what I'll do today, the second day of the 6-day workshop. Yes, it's nice having the cameras (and I appreciate my friends lending me their expensive equipment), but it is a logistical challenge to be sure. We'll see what kind of footage I'm capturing. I do it mostly to upload to YouTube and distribute to teachers' groups. I do this for people who are interested in the Silent Way approach to teaching languages. It is a difficult approach to explain, and is more easily understood if just seen. As a teacher, Talmy, you can appreciate how difficult this sort of task can be. You know, to show all that is going on in a class, or at least much of what is going on. Anyway, we'll see what I come up with when I finally get around to editing it this summer. (I always dread that--I am usually disappointed either by what I did as a teacher or by the poor footage captured!)