How to work best with old analog media?

Hi,

I have lots of old analog material that needs remastering. Unfortunately FCPX dropped the option to import directly from my Sony TVR20E camera which acts as media converter for the even older Sony TR2000E Hi8 camera that also plays Video8 tapes. Fortunately older versions of iMovie or Final Cut Express 4 have an option to manually import from Firewire input. The way I process the material is importing the capture file, create a project and insert the clip in the timeline and cut and trim it.

These media have no timecode imported (most of the original media do have TC, but this is not included with the digital input from the TVR20E), so clips will not be automatically cut. In the event library there is only one big clip. Compared to the current digital media it is big step back in processing. It would be very nice if the individual clips could be stored back in the event library so they can be rated, provided with keywords, notes, etc. I have been looking for options in FCPX or plugins, but can not find anything to make life easier. I see a lot of similar questions about the same issue, but no real answers. Anybody out there that has tackled this problem?

Thanks in advance,

Jelle

I'm not sure if there is a great solution with your setup to do this automatically.

I do remember a pro Hi8 studio deck at a job I had long ago that would give deck control.

One option is you could use QT7 Pro and make cutdowns after the ingest. If you save them as self contained movies there would be no generation loss for each clip.

Another option is TPayton's excellent sub clipping tutorial found here: www.fcp.co/forum/4-final-cut-pro-x-fcpx/...-subclipping-in-fcpx

Darren,

Thanks for your response . The subclipping tutorial is indeed the perfect solution. I have seen the topic yesterday, but may just have missed the excellent tutorial. Especially creating compound clips gives me all options required. This makes it easy to tag as favorites/rejects, adding keywords and notes and process the clips just lik the digital material.

I would not invest in old equipment. The TR2000E is a functional Hi8 deck, but there is no application on the Mac capable to control it, as far as I know. However, importing the whole tape as an archive will do.

Jelle