• Panasonic Cameras

  Custom Clip filenames ???

  Posted by Thepelell on January 20, 2006 at 10:05 am

  hi all, i have been working on a multi cam shoot the past days with 3 sdx900 with p2. The guys at editing are having a bad time separating various clips because of their useless names (001d500 and so on)
  Is it possible to set the prefix of the clip filename before shooting? somthing like: interview-mrX001 , interview-mrX002 , ecc… it would make life much easier when you have 500 clips a day to sort and edit .
  Thanks

  Barry Green replied 20 years, 7 months ago 2 Members · 1 Reply
• 1 Reply

• 

  Barry Green

  January 21, 2006 at 7:41 am

  You can do something like this on the HVX. I don’t recall if the SPX800 can do it or not, but I’m certain it can.

  I’ll describe the process on the HVX200, it should be similar for the SPX800.

  What you can do won’t change the clip’s actual name, but you can attach your own name to the clip metadata through the SD card (when recording) or through the P2 Viewer (after recording). If you want to add a file to the SD card so that every clip you create automatically has the custom name attached, you’d use the P2 Viewer software to create a clip metadata file, and assign the name you want (i.e., “interview-MrX”) into the User Clip Name field of the metadata. Then save that file to the SD card. Plug the SD card into the camera, and go into the menus and make sure that you load the metadata file from the card. Also, go into the metadata->record menu and choose “on”, so that it will know to attach your custom metadata to all clips recorded from that point forward.

  So now, when you hit “record”, it’ll attach the name “interview-MrX” to every clip recorded from that time forward. When you go on to the next interview subject, you’d change the filename in the P2 Viewer program and re-save it on the SD card, and re-load that new file into the camera.

  The metadata records all sorts of fields — shoot date, timecode, the person shooting, the user clip name, a descriptive text memo of the shot, the serial number of the camera that shot the shot, the gps coordinates of where the shoot took place (if you have a GPS card for the SPX)… all sorts of stuff. That all gets recorded on the P2 card in the “CLIP” directory, in the .XML file. So to locate all interview clips named “interview-MrX”, you’d search the CLIP directory for all XML files containing “interview-MrX”. Some of these fields are generated by the camera, but you can set a lot of them yourself and have them automatically attached. You can have it assign a custom clip name, the name of the clip creator, the last person to update the clip, the name of the shoot, the shoot place, you can name the “scenario” (i.e., “scene 4/living room” or whatever), and there’s also space for a general-purpose text memo.

  I don’t know how thoroughly NLE programs have integrated the MXF metadata information; obviously there’s a lot that could be integrated. It seems like a fairly trivial programming task to implement a P2 Rename function, one which would allow you to specify a filename and the P2 Rename utility would go out and rename all the associated files (the video, audio, icon, xml, etc) and write the new name into the metadata XML file.

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