The Canon EOS 7D Mark II is the long-awaited replacement to the 7D. Video-wise the 7D II can capture Full HD video at a variety of frame rates, including 59.94 fps, with your choice of file formats (MOV or MP4) and compression algorithms (IBP, ALL-I, Light IPB). All of these are great, till you find it is a problem importing the Canon 7D Mark II footage to Final Cut Pro for editing.
With my EOS 7D II footage, I’ve been using Streamclip and converting footage to ProRes. But I downloaded the update from Canon, and it’s reading the Canon options on FCP. But dragging the .mov into Log & Transfer isn’t working. It keeps saying “Can’t Read” or “Not Compatible.” I have scoured the internet, tried everything I could find and got some clues.
As we can see, the in-camera video is recorded using the high quality H.264/MPEG-4 AVC codec. However, H.264 is a delivery codec rather than editing code. Even the raw video from Canon 7D Mark II could be successfully loaded to FCP X, the film would still look quite jumpy. A possible solution I’ve worked out is to transcode Canon EOS 7D Mark II H.264 to a format more friendly for FCP, for instance, Apple ProRes 422 with Brorsoft Video Converter for Mac, a professional Canon H.264 Converter Mac.
Overall, this program is a completely professional Canon H.264 video converter, player and editor. Unlike some free video converters, it provides hundreds of output format presets for your Canon DSLR MOV/MP4 footage, such as Apple ProRes 422, Apple ProRes 422(HQ), Apple ProRes 422 (LT), Apple ProRes 422 (Proxy), and Apple ProRes 4444 for Final Cut Pro, AIC MOV for FCE (Final Cut Express) and iMovie, DNxHD .mov for Avid Media Composer and more formats for better editing, playing. This Canon DSLR Video Converter is also available to customize the output resolutions to any size the users want.
How to Convert EOS 7D Mark II video files to work in Final Cut Pro
Step 1. Free Download and run the top Mac Canon H.264 Converter, drag Canon EOS 7D Mark II recorded videos to the software.
Tip: If you have multiple MOV, MP4 files, you can select the “Merge into one” box to join your video clips into one single file.
Step 2. Click the format bar, and move mouse cursor to “Final Cut Pro > Apple ProRes 422 (*.mov)” as output format.
Step 3. Click “Convert” button to start transcoding 7D Mark II h.264 mov/mp4 to ProRes Codec for Final Cut Pro 7/X on Mac OS.
Some more helpful features of the Canon H.264 Video Converter:
1. Settings- click to set video resolution(1920×1080/1440×1080/1280×720/720×480), bitrate(from 1Mbps to 20Mbps), frame rate (24p/30p)
2. Editor (next to “Add” icon)- click to set deinterlace, trim, crop, effect, subtitles, etc.
So there you have it. Pretty simple. After the workflow, you can go to the output folder to find the converted video files. Now you are free to log and transfer or import/edit Canon 5D Mark III videos in Final Cut Pro under Mac OS X(Mountain Lion, Mavericks, Yosemite) without problems.
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