Editing Flip Camera Video in Final Cut Pro

By Peter Cervieri in Scribe Gear on September 29, 2008

I love the flip camera. I’ve been in many situations where I have a small HD camera in my backpack and the flip camera in my pocket and I still reach for the flip.

However, funny stuff happens when I want to do some light editing with the flip and drag the .AVI files into Final Cut. First I have to render audio and video. But when I start playing the footage on my time line, there is a black flickering that happens every second or so, almost as if every 30th frame is not there.

To solve this problem, I downloaded MPEG Streamclip, which is a free video converter that converts the source .AVI files to .MOV Quicktime files.

That solved the problem. I’m now happily editing away.

MPEG Streamclip supports the following input formats: MPEG, VOB, PS, M2P, MOD, VRO, DAT, MOV, DV, AVI, MP4, TS, M2T, MMV, REC, VID, AVR, M2V, M1V, MPV, AIFF, M1A, MP2, MPA, AC3.

MPEG_Streamclip

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Peter Cervieri is co-founder of and Director of Business Development for ScribeMedia.Org. He has many fetishes. Among them is collecting business cards.

Discussion

5 comments for “Editing Flip Camera Video in Final Cut Pro”

  1. Just a quick note,

    I would recommend bumping the quality up to 99% instead of 50% to squeeze the most quality possible out of the flip video.

    You made a good call with the Apple Motion JPEG codec (it has very little quality loss) but you need to squeeze every ounce of quality out of the .AVI so if you bump the quality up to 99% you should be good to go.

    You also may want to select 720×480 instead of 640×480, however the flip may not naively record in 720×480 so I don’t think you are looking at a significant quality difference either way.

    Finally I would uncheck interlaced scaling and check deinterlace video.

    Posted by Jason | September 30, 2008, 9:09 am

  2. I used the tool, which is sweet, and free - but Final Cut still gives me a red line and wants to render the video before it will play it, any idea why?

    Posted by Steve Rosenbaum | October 12, 2008, 8:47 pm

  3. steve,

    what format did you convert the video to?

    Posted by Peter Cervieri | October 12, 2008, 9:35 pm

  4. i just converted a .m4v to .mov using MPEG Streamclip. the source .m4v file was about 1.8GB.

    i converted using Apple Motion JPEG A at the best quality and the new MOV file is 38GB.

    MPEG Streamclip converted the video in what seems to be pretty close to real time, so the 2 hour long video took almost that long to convert.

    Posted by Peter Cervieri | May 29, 2009, 6:04 pm

  5. I have problems with the audio. Any ideas why I don’t get the audio into FCP? Video works just fine…

    Posted by Kitty | June 7, 2009, 11:14 am

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