Consumer video and FCP

Hi editors,
Is anyone familiar with the .mpg files that come from consumer video cameras--most likely the DVD camcorders?
I tried to convert in Quicktime to many formats, and the problem is:
FCP will NOT recognize the audio of any, including the original format.
I told my friend (favor video) that a consumer editing program might accept the formats... but maybe I could find a way to convert for FCP...
Any thoughts?

I have a dvdcamcorder (got it for a client that had some dvd's he'd recorded on one without "finalizing" the disks). What I did was capture on a pc using the software that came with it (pc only and usb2 connections). I then brought the files over to the mac and did some simple editing in dvdsp without having to do any decompress/recompress.

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By doing what?
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x
Do your part in supporting your fellow users. If a response has been Helpful to you or Solved your question, please mark it as such as an aid to other lost souls on the forum.
Also, don't forget to mark the thread Answered when you get enough information to close the thread.

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Mac OS X (10.4.1)
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Standard Definition (the format which the DVX100 shoots in) has a relatively straightforward editing workflow, tried and tested in recent years and easy to work with, particularly if you are working on a budget and are restricted to using an iMac, which has less options for expandability i.e adding a second firewire bus (not firewire port - sometimes you can get problems capturing video via firewire if you have your transfer deck or camera hooked up to your computer on the same firewire bus, despite being on separate ports - not always and you may never experience the problem, but if you're editing in more than a casual user environment you don't want to take the risk)
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HDV which the XA-H1 shoots in, is at the lower end of the Hi Def formats, looks great when shot well and displayed on a large screen hi-def tv, but is highly compressed and causes problems in the editing workflow.
Ideally, you want to have a monitor or at least a portable tv hooked up to your computer for external monitoring of your video - to check whether titles are correctly displayed within the title-safe areas and more importantly for colour correction as computer displays and tvs don't display video the same and whereas this may not be important if you're videoing your great aunt's birthday or the kids playing in the park, if you're doing serious stuff, such as commercials or short films you need to be able to monitor externally.
Performing this is simple if you're editing standard def but if you're editing HDV you can't do this using the method described.
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Also, when shooting in any hi-def format, your technical camera skills need to be more proficient - focus in an image that is blown up to higher sizes if much more critical and you're going to show every blemish and wrinkle of a character's skin.
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This may be your best option, but you'll need to check if the XA-H1 has this facility - I'm not familiar with this camera but know that the Sony Z1 or v1 both offer this facility.
Don't forget, there's not yet an inexpensive way of burning HD/HDV material to DVD that'll play in the majority of HDDVD/Blu-ray players yet - that's coming in the near(ish) future, so if you are outputting to DVD, you'll have to do this in SD anyway.
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Search the forum for HDV to check out the current thinking on editing HDV - there's masses of opinion out there.
Good luck!

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Consumer video and FCP

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