Merge FCP7 "Capture Scratch" and "Audio Capture Scratch" files?

I have an old Final Cut Pro 7 project captured from Beta SP tape into separate "Capture Scratch" and "Audio Capture Scratch" folders for the Video and Audio parts of the files. I no longer have Final Cut Studio V3.0 installed on my Mac.

I would like to be able to use those captured files in a Final Cut Pro X project. Is there any way to import the FCP7 Audio and Video elements into a single merged Final Cut Pro event? The audio is PCM single channel 48 Khz and the video is PAL ProRes 702x576, 25 FPS.

Thanks!

If those are separate files you can simply import them both and then in the FCPX timeline manually line up the audio to sync to the video. Without being able to create an xml for the FCP7 project (since it's not installed) I can't think of another way to do that.

FCP7 did not separate audio from the video files it imported. The Audio Capture, from my memory, would have been audio only clips.

Thanks dgwvideo.

Yes, that would work and someone suggested I create a 'Compound Clip' of the pair, Share it and re-import it as a normal combined Audio and Video file. I tried that and it works. Unfortunately I have 13 hours of captured material in about 90 separate Video and Audio files and I was hoping for some kind of way to automate the syncing process. Only the source media files are important since no editing of any importance was done with the material in FCP7.

Hello EditorGuy.

Final Cut Pro 7 had the option to capture Audio and Video to separate folders when capturing from tape. FCP7 created two folders - 'Capture Scratch' and 'Audio Capture Scratch'. This material was captured from Beta SP tapes in a Betacam SP machine.

someone suggested I create a 'Compound Clip' of the pair, Share it and re-import it as a normal combined Audio and Video file. I tried that and it works. Unfortunately I have 13 hours of captured material in about 90 separate Video and Audio files

Yeah, that was me. You could put them all into a single project and slice and dice into favorites once the new media has been reimported. There are only kludges for us to suggest for you to remedy this situation since you took advantage of the FCP7 ability to separate the audio and video portions of the clips.

Thanks again bogiesan.

I think you’re right. Joining them up into a single project or a number of projects and splitting them later seems like the only way.

I tried it on a single pair yesterday and it seemed to go fine. But when I looked at the resulting ‘Shared’ file it was smaller than my original Video only source file. I had not selected any transcoding option during Import, so ‘Optimised’ and ‘Proxy’ were not ticked. And when I shared to a ‘Master File’ I didn’t make any changes. FCPX did make my audio a ‘Stereo’ file although the source was ‘Mono’.

So my exported/Shared file should have been bigger than my source Video only file. But it’s about 20% smaller. I tried another ‘Share’ and got the same result.

When it’s exporting I had a look at the process and I think there was a ‘Transcoding’ element (I’m not at that Mac now, so can’t be exact). I presumed that was just the ‘Share’ integrating the audio and video into a single file. But maybe I’ve overlooked something else that’s reducing the file quality. Any thoughts?

Thanks again for your help.

Combining the two files into a single file does not produce a file that is the sum of both files. You have a new file in a new format. If the quality is the same, don't worry about it.

One other thought. Sometimes QT Pro (which might be on your old FCP7 machine) will automatically combine the video and audio files that have the same metadata. You could move or copy one video file and its corresponding audio file to a new folder and try opening the video file in QTPro. You might find the audio is there, too. If so, save the new movie.

Hello bogiesan.

I thought the quality of the merged file seemed of a slightly lower quality. So I used ‘Media Inspector’ to look at the data rate in the source video and the merged file and found it was lower in the merged file.

I had made every effort to retain the same quality settings when importing into FCPX and when ‘Sharing’ to a new merged file. The source was already PAL ProRes 422 and I tried both importing the files into FCPX and leaving them where they were. I didn’t make Optimised or Proxy media and I chose to let the first file on the timeline dictate the video parameters. I realise the Shared file is a new format, but how would it keep the same quality with a lower bit rate? I’ll have to do a comprehensive re-check of my import and export workflow and see if I’m missing something somewhere.

Your suggestion about Quicktime Pro is worth a try though. I don’t still have it installed, but I do have all my original Final Cut Studio ver. 3.0 install DVDs, so maybe I can install it from those.

Thanks again for taking the time to help and for your suggestions.

I discovered why there’s a discrepancy between my source file data rate and my merged ‘Share’ from FCPX.

I took a closer look at the codec info in ‘Media Inspector’ and discovered that my source video file was ProRes 422 but in a different variant of ProRes 422 from that which FCPX used in the share. My source file had the codec info ‘apch’ attached while the FCPX share was ‘apcn’. ‘apch’ means it’s ProRes 422 HQ while the FCPX ‘apcn’ means it’s plain ProRes 422 with a significantly lower data rate. Apple explains it in more detail here support.apple.com/en-us/HT202410 .

So FCPX import seems to ignore that my source video file seems to have been captured in ProRes 422 HQ and even when ‘ProRes 422 - Source’ is selected in the Share settings it exports the result as plain ProRes 422. This could be because PAL SD material gains little or no benefit from the HQ variant. When I switched the Share settings to ‘ProRes 422 HQ’ I got the kind of file size and data rate I originally expected.