Canon XH-A1 HDV Footage and FCPX

A client just gave me three HDV tapes and his XH-A1 camera to offload footage from. After reading about some people having problems with this, I was expecting the worst.
Much to my surprise, I connected the camera to my Mac Pro via firewire and selected import from camera in FCPX. It immediately recognized the XH-A1 and its' timecode and I had full transport control of the camera. I imported all the tapes with absolutely no problems. It could not have been easier. FCPX even created separate clips at timecode breaks.

Just thought I'd pass this on in case anyone has that camera and was wondering about compatibility with FCPX.

Even though tape is supposedly dead, the improved HDV importer is a huge improvement.

HDV always had (automatic) start/stop detection in FCP. :whistle:

Luckily it was recorded on tape (the good old backup!) and not on a Focus Enhancement FSCV DTE via the XH-A1, because at this point I am having issues getting my recorded files into FCPX.
After Quicktime version 7.6.6, Apple changed something in the program that makes these DTE MOV files unreadable. The workaround I was told is to have QT 7.6.6 also installed to transcode these files. (This hasn't worked for me yet!)

No sure if anyone out there has found a proper solution to this issue !

Well this is really another topic, and I don't want this thread to be a mile long filled with multiple unsearchable topics...

....but to answer your question, I have been able on some occasions to import an older quicktime movie into fcpx (which comes in with audio only and no video but have the file size indicating video is in the container) and then export the same file to 720p (for example) which is then saved in QT10. I have had this work before.

The best option for you is to install QT7 in the utilities folder. It can coexist with QT10. You can then open all older QT movies with this and export them to h.264 and other formats very well.