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European Codec Troubles
I was given several discs of footage, AVIs, mpg4s, and the like from Belgium, medical stuff from various odd recording technology, and I’ll be damned if I am not having the same problems I have had in the past with footage sent to me from Europe and Australia. After finally getting this stuff into FCP for a little titling and editing, I create a self-contained FCP file to take into either Episode Pro or Compressor. Then all kinds of crazy looking hippie-like tripin’ artifacts come up, and Episode won’t even allow me to codec these clips. I thought of running each timeline to tape first, then re-batching it, but can anyone tell me why I always have this trouble with European codecs? I swear that once some time ago, I had a similar set of troubles, and the footage corrupted my system, making it impossible to open up the FCP file I was working in. I had to create a new file, and do the same transfer to tape thing, then back in again, but start a completely new FCP file. I am using FCP 6.0.6 on OS 10.5.8.
Greg Ondera
http://www.Plexus.tv
http://www.SurgeonToday.org -
2 Replies
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There really isn’t any such thing as “European codecs” to my knowledge. There are international based video standards that differ from our NTSC standard, but the difference is in pixel resolution and frame rate, which should really be a non-issue from a codec standpoint if the original footage is transcoded properly to NTSC for editing in Final Cut.
I’m not saying you didn’t transcode it correctly, but tell us what you’re coming out of Final Cut with in terms of the files. What is the pixel resolution, what codec are you using, what format are you saving to (.mov, mp4?)….etc.
It would also help to find a media player or tool that can tell you (and us) the specs of the original files, meaning the info above, as well as the chroma sampling (4:2:2, 4:2:0, 4:1:1 etc.) since you mention weird trippy issues which I’m assuming are color issues. Trying to upsample from a reduced color space might cause some weird color issues (but really shouldn’t).
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com
Read our blog http://www.videomi.com/blog -
Greg,
We too, not surprisingly, get a lot of odd formats recorded with laparoscopic video systems. Recently we were sent a hard drive with a 300 gigabyte HD video file. It took about a week to find the right conversion method so we could edit in Premiere.Is the file you received 25fps? If it is PAL, or PAL-ish, that probably means the dimensions are off kilter too. The laparoscopes that claim to be high def are usually some odd dimensions, like 1915×1071 or 1150×729 – just to be difficult. HD yes – standard no.
So far it seems HD scopes are designed for good imaging in the OR, not really for editing the recorded video.
Anyway, are you editing in PAL in Final Cut, or did you transcode the video first to NTSC?
A lot of variables here.
Mike Cohen
PS – Always good to talk to another surgical video practitioner.
Medical Education / Multimedia Producer
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