AVCHD + Perian = Sad Final Cut

Just a few weeks ago I excitedly unwrapped my shiny new Canon HF10 like an excited kid on Christmas morning (it’s one of those fancy tapeless HD camcorders).

The HF10 uses a video codec called AVCHD (that’s Advanced Video Codec High Definition) which compresses the heck out of HD video and squeezes it onto flash memory (hence “tapeless”). This is great because you no longer need to buy tons of tapes to record your video (believe me, I have spent more money on tapes over the last two years of filming a video podcast than I did on the HF10 and a 16GB SD card) but since that video is so darned compressed the app that you use to import your footage needs to know what to do with the AVCHD format.

Luckily both Final Cut Pro and Express (and even iMovie ‘08) can handle AVCHD (as long as you have an Intel Mac and are aware of these caveats) so I thought I was in the clear in regards to getting the footage off the camera and onto my Mac.

I happily shot some video, hooked up the camera to my MacBook Pro, launched Final Cut Pro… and Final Cut crashed. A fluke, I thought, so I launched Final Cut again. It crashed. I deleted some preference files and relaunched Final Cut. Crash.

My eventual solution? I bought a new MacBook Pro and installed Final Cut Pro fresh, which did the trick [I think we call that the “scorched earth” approach -DM]. However, Apple has just posted a Knowledge Base article that details a slightly less expensive solution to the problem: uninstall Perian, the open source component that gives QuickTime native support for a host of video formats, and Final Cut will stop crashing when it tries to import AVCHD footage. I imagine that is a much more workable solution for most folks.

(Please note I didn’t buy a new MacBook Pro just to solve this problem, but it was a happy side effect.)