So as most of you know, I bought a new HD camera to film videos for Tech65. Today, I decided to give a hand at editting my first HD (720p) movie, so I imported the files from the camera into a folder on my iMac before importing it into a new Final Cut Express project after discovering before hand that “Log and Transfer” (quicktime link) doesn’t work with this camera. I was happy that I could just edit as usual with the HD files in the project, before discovering the following:

It looks quite normal doesn’t it? Just to explain what you’re looking at, the left window is the clip I would like to add into my sequence, while the right window is a preview of my sequence now. I edit by setting a start point and an end point (called in and out points) in the left window and drag it into the right so that it drops into my sequence.

So what do I want you to see? Well, if you notice, the left window is in HD. It’s a widescreen view and fills up the window completely. THE RIGHT IS NOT!!! IT’S A NORMAL 4:3 VIDEO WITH AN UGLY LETTERBOX!!!

What happened was that because my Sanyo camera was smart enough to make things very simple for its users by placing AVCHD files together with the photo files so that you didn’t have to dig through a series of complex folder structures just to find your video file. The thing is, Final Cut Express won’t recognise the files if they’re not in that complicated folder structure, so it’s gonna treat it as a normal video. And since Final Cut automatically sets the sequence frame size to the type of video you drag in, and since it can’t tell it’s a HD file, it’s making me edit it as a standard video!! I just wasted a lot of time!!!

And guess what, I tried iMovie 08, and boom! Immediately the “import video” window popped up, took the HD clip in my camera, and put it into iMovie to make a proper HD movie! Final Cut just tried to act smart on me…