Canon finally releases their DSLR plug-in for Final Cut Pro’s Log and Transfer tool

The Editblog on PVC by Scott Simmons

We all know this fact: The Canon DSLRs (5D, 7D, 1D) use the H.264 codec for the video they shoot and wrap that into a .mov QuickTime. While Final Cut Pro does work with .movs, these H.264 versions are clunky to edit requiring much rendering when in a FCP timeline. H.264 wasn’t designed to be a robust edit format anyway so the files need to be transcoded into something more edit friendly.

Enter the new EOS MOVIE Plugin-E1 for Final Cut Pro. You can download it from Canon’s website my selecting Mac OS X from the Drivers / Software Selection on the website.

This plug-in delivers on an idea that the folks at Gluetools had been promising for a while but the info has since been removed from their website. Apparently this Canon release is that plug-in. Such a plug-in eliminates the need to send a batch through Compressor (or another transcoding application) to make ProRes files from your H.264 originals. While there’s still very valid reasons to use a Compressor-like workflow (speed, multicore or distributed rendering, transcoding on a different workstation) it makes good sense to be able to do this in Log and Transfer as well.

Log and Transfer does provide some nice options. It’s a good place to audition your clips and take care of some logging tasks right from the start of an edit. While I prefer to have as much footage from a shoot as possible online to edit there are often heads and tails and/or entire clips that you would never need ... like when the camera man was accidentally rolling while the camera is pointed at the floor. The Log and Transfer tool is a good place to sort this out. With this tool you can make INs and OUTs on clips as well as log clip names, comments and metadata. read more...