Using FLVs in Final Cut Pro

Nathan Beaman

Tue, Jul 15, 2008

There could be any number of reason that you may be stuck with an FLV as a source file, none of them are good, as far I am concerned. While you’re at it, pray that the FLV sources are temporary placeholders for the beautiful full resolution source images that are to follow.

Why would anyone want to use an FLV source in the first place? You Tube and many other streaming web services are flash based and fairly easy to rip source video from. If you need or want to pull from one of these videos and you can’t get your hands on the source, working with the FLV is an option. Where I run into from time to time professional is stock footage sources. Many stock footage sources are switching to Flash in order to streamline their services. It reduces the files size and bandwidth loads of their huge libraries and adds another step to pulling the images from the web. This obviously doesn’t stop people from doing it, but believe it or not, changing a process from one click to two clicks, deters a lot of people. Some places, such as iStockphoto actually provide you with flv sources as previews.

Adobe Flash FLVs and Final Cut Pro don’t play well together. In fact current versions of Quicktime do not support FLVs at all. If you try to open an FLV with Quicktime you will get an error denoting that Quicktime does not recognize the file as a movie file.

A quick solution to this and many other Quicktime incompatibilities is a free plugin called Perian, The swiss army knife of quicktime.

Once you’ve installed Perian you will be able to import FLVs directly into Final Cut Pro, as seen below.

Don’t get to happy and run right into it, as I wouldn’t recommend using the FLVs directly in Final Cut. Even though they’ll playback, FLVs still aren’t native to the program and could introduce a level of instability into your project. Also flvs are often various frame sizes and frame rates, you could be setting yourself up with a very jumbled project and a lot of unnecessary re-rendering.

You should convert all the flv source to a video standard that Final Cut supports natively. Doing this not only frees up system resources while editing, but it helps in standardizing your footage and project.

Dropping all the FLVs in Compressor and running a batch conversion is great, but Compressor still doesn’t like FLVs at this point. With Perian installed, Compressor will read and convert FLVs but it is fairly unstable and prone to getting caught up on longer files or on long batches. In order to get around this, we’ll make QT wrappers for the flvs.

Open the FLV with Quicktime and select Save As. When the dialog appears select save as reference movie. By doing this we aren’t asking quicktime to convert the clip at the moment or duplicating media, we’re simply making a quicktime file that references the source FLV. This alone actually can trick most Quicktime native apps into having more stability when working with these kinds of files, but we still need to do our standard conversion.

Open up Compressor and start a new batch. Drag all your Quicktime reference files in. In the presets select DV/NTSC and apply it to all the clips. In my project I’ve actually used 8 bit NTSC because I was temporarily cutting the footage in with preexisting stuff and I wanted all my codecs to mesh.

Submit your batch, grab a cup of coffee and keep working on something else. Compressor will chug through each clip, using the quicktime reference movie you made to direct it to the FLV source. This is much more stable than using the FLV files directly in Compressor and should be fairly headache free. Depending on your target compression the conversion should be fairly fast.

When it’s done – import and edit away!

Leave a Reply

Login

Press Releases

Tags

"lipitor drug cost"

prednisone stopped taking side effects

prednisone stopped taking side effects

accutane timeline!

"lipitor drug cost"

difference between lexapro and celexa,

prednisone stopped taking side effects

"lipitor drug cost"

difference between lexapro and celexa,

prednisone stopped taking side effects

difference between lexapro and celexa,

Lipitor is there a generic 27 and on accutane 129.

accutane timeline!

difference between lexapro and celexa,

accutane timeline!

"lipitor drug cost"

difference between lexapro and celexa,

prednisone stopped taking side effects

"lipitor drug cost"

accutane timeline!

difference between lexapro and celexa,

accutane timeline!

Lipitor is there a generic 27 and on accutane 129.

cipro and std treatment

accutane timeline!

Lipitor is there a generic 27 and on accutane 129.

prednisone stopped taking side effects

cipro and std treatment

prednisone stopped taking side effects

difference between lexapro and celexa,

prednisone stopped taking side effects

difference between lexapro and celexa,

accutane timeline!

"lipitor drug cost"

prednisone stopped taking side effects

difference between lexapro and celexa,

difference between lexapro and celexa,

"lipitor drug cost"

prednisone stopped taking side effects

difference between lexapro and celexa,

prednisone stopped taking side effects

"lipitor drug cost"

Lipitor is there a generic 27 and on accutane 129.

difference between lexapro and celexa,

prednisone stopped taking side effects

prednisone stopped taking side effects

difference between lexapro and celexa,

prednisone stopped taking side effects

difference between lexapro and celexa,

difference between lexapro and celexa,

prednisone stopped taking side effects

difference between lexapro and celexa,

Latest Videos

Categories

Archives