Yesterday, I made a rare visit to Apple’s Discussion board. I read several help questions posted for Final Cut Pro. And one of them caught my interest. It appeared that the person posting this topic had trouble importing a video clip from Stock Photography (www.istockphoto.com). He noted that the video compressor is Photo JPEG. Hmm… Final Cut Pro should have no trouble importing video clips that are compressed with Photo JPEG, I thought. I also thought that the video clip probably had no file extension, which caused Final Cut Pro to fail to recognize the file. But that wasn’t the case.
Anyway, I got this video clip so that I could help him more closely. And he was right. My Final Cut Pro 6 refused to accept the file though there was a file extension.
Using Final Cut Pro requires some skills as it’s not an easy guy to get along with. One important skill is to recognize the problem and then to find a possible workaround.
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So I used two tools to possibly identify the problem. One is Squared 5‘s MPEG Streamclip, which I used to check the video compressor and the frame rate of the video clip. You can also use VideoLAN‘s VLC to check the parameters. The other tool is Apple’s QuickTime Pro. Basically, I used it to re-compress the video clip.
Anyway, MPEG confirmed to me that the video compressor is Photo JPEG. The video resolution is 640 x 360 pixels. And its Show Stream Info also shows that the frame rate is 23.976. |
Maybe, there is some sort of DRM that prevents me from importing the video clip to Final Cut Pro? I doubted that possibility. But I went ahead and recompressed the video with Photo JPEG. I wasn’t fully conscious at first, but it turned out that I recompressed it at a frame rate of 24. Anyway, Final Cut Pro accepted the video clip, which I named test01.mov.
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After all, it’s some sort of copy-protection algorithm that prevented me from importing the video clip to Final Cut Pro? But that didn’t sound right. So I turned my attention to the frame rate this time. And, using QuickTime Pro, I recompressed the video at the original frame rate. This time, I named the clip test02.mov. And if I drag and drop this clip onto Final Cut Pro’s Browser… Ahh… Final Cut Pro doesn’t read it.
So we now know what’s stopping Final Cut Pro from reading the original video clip. It’s the frame rate. Final Cut Pro appears not to like the frame rate of 23.976. So a simple solution to the problem is to change the frame rate to 24 fps.
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Final Cut Pro and QuickTime are products of Apple, Inc.
MPEG Streamclip is a product of Squared 5.
I don’t know who you are, but you have saved my life. This problem has been bedeviling me for months, and this is the only solution I have found. Thank you, my friend. The time you took to post this advice was not in vain. It may even have saved my job. A thousand thank you’s.