D90 Work Flow in Final Cut Pro

The new Nikon D90 has the amazing capability of recording video and audio. We have never seen such quality come from a prosumer video camera, much less a still camera! The interchangeable lens's makes this camera and the results a gold mine.

We recently shot a short piece for the John Lennon Bus to test the camera. Click here to view the final piece. 

Because this is a new process and we ran into some challenges, we decided to port our work flow for this project and share with you how we did it.

WORK FLOW:

Tools: D90 and a tascam recorder.

The audio from the camera is descent, however if you are in a loud environment like we were, using a external audio recorder is the way to go.

For the broll we kept the camera audio, however for the interviews, we used the audio recorder with the D90 and synced it in post production. (Here is a video that shows you how syncing works)

Note: The D90 only records up to a maximum of 5 minutes of video at a time, keep this in mind when interviewing people.

After recording we used a card reader to view the clips on our computer. The D90 generates AVI Files, we coped the files into a Hard Drive.

CHALLENEGE: The AVI files require you to render when brought into final cut. Also, when we brought our AVI files into Final Cut and our audio from the tascam our interviews would go off sync. The audio from the AVI file and the Wav file from the external audio recorder would lose sync about 3 minutes into the interview.

Here is how we fixed this:

1. We sent the AVI file through compressor (both video and audio)
2. We created a droplet with the correct setting to make this process a lot faster
3. You can download the droplet here Download 720_Droplet.app
4. Open the droplet, drag and drop your video clips and set the location of where you want to save
5. After you compress, take the clips into final cut pro
6. Create a new sequence with the following settings:

 

And you are ready to edit!

We found that running the clips through compressor (which converts your clips to .mov files), you do not lose video quality and the audio syncs up perfectly. Not to mention this eliminates rendering, unlike the original AVI files.

Hope this is helpful. If you have any questions please shoot us an email!

Comments

[alex]

why did you change from 24fps to 30fps? Doesn't the d90 shoot 24?

[Anastasia]

This is incredibly helpful! Thank you so much for sharing!!

[Rosa]

Hi Alex and Anastasia,

For this project, we used an external audio recorder and when it came to syncing the audio and video we were experiencing some problems. The first 3 minutes would sync and it would slowly go off sync. The way we solved this was by compressing the video from 24fps to 30fps. As soon as we synced our audio to our video at 30fps it worked.

[Blake]

When I try to drag the AVI file onto the droplet, it won't open and convert. If I drag a .mov file it works perfectly, but the footage that I shot with the d90 is .avi. Any suggestions?

[Jonathan]

Hi,
I'm trying to edit a music video using this droplet,
I get an error trying to use the droplet, it says "error: classname is null"

[AlasMedia]

Hi Jonathan,

Do you have Compressor installed on your computer?

[Robert G.]

Thank you so much! I was so not looking forward to all that rendering. The only problem is that when exporting to Quicktime, that color and Gamma seem to have shifted dramatically.

I exported using the current settings, and no joy. Am I supposed to set something different for export? Thank you for your help.