Pro Tip Time: Ok, so I have this gig where I need to record a bit of HD footage, but haven’t had the cashflow to get one of those super expensive P2 cards that does more than 4 minutes at the time.
A few months ago, I had the fortune to help work on a commercial for anti-bullying at a local school and solved this problem by live capturing in Final Cut Pro 7. It worked fine enough, but we had issues with it crashing alongside my Panasonic HVX200, so I wondered about finding a more solid solution.
Final Cut Pro X appears to capture, but results in no file. iMovie comes up static, but it never supported the P2 footage, to my knowledge.
In comes Quicktime X to save the day! Go to File > New Movie Recording, pick your video and audio source as your firewire camera, put on Max quality and bam, full HD capture!
So far, it’s looks pretty steady on my late 2009 Macbook Pro. Mission Accomplished. According to iStat, it isn’t pushing more than 25% of my CPU.