AVCHD offline issue with mountain lion?

[Phillip Todd]

Hi Dale,

I have switched from FCP7 to Premiere CS6. There are differences in how PPro references your media (not as well as FCP7). Once you put it in a folder and import it into Ppro, don’t move it, or at least know you will have to “know” where it is and show PPro where it is. The issue is that in 10.8 the “PRIVATE” folder is encapsulated by the OS. Right click & select “Show Contents” in the OS opens it. This can’t be done within Premiere. The work around is to rename the encapsulated folders in lowercase ( “private” )
Then the OS lets you & PPro in. A neat trick.

I also shoot AVCHD on multiple cameras, which creates potential havoc for PPro if you have to relink to your media. If 3 cameras all have the same file# “0000.mts” then PPro gets confused and uses one camera file for all the cameras, even when you have relinked. This happened to me once, and that was enough.

Today I wrote up a best practice guide for myself. It may help you.

Workflow required for less painful AVCHD Multicam native editing in CS6 on a Mac w/10.8:

1. Insert SD card from camera into card reader.
2. Open the SD card. Change “PRIVATE” to “private”, repeat for ‘AVCHD’ and ‘BDMV’ folders.
3. Download & open “NameChanger.app” (google it)
4. In “NameChanger.app” using the “Prepend” function change name of .MTS files from “0000.MTS” to “130627 PT int Acam 0000.MTS” (DATE + PROJECT NAME + CAM + FILE# ) or similar descriptive name for viewing in PPro timeline. (erase your mistakes using the “remove characters” function).
5. Using Apple’s Disk Utility click the icon for “New Image” and create a disk image (.dmg file) of the SD card. Settings: Read only, no encryption. Note: Read/Write will create an exact copy of your ENTIRE card including the free disk space. This will really just take up unnecessary extra room on your system.
6. Repeat until all SD cards are archived.
7. When ready to edit, open the .dmg ‘s of your SD card. FCP7 will recognize them as mounted SD card so you can transcode them. In PPro no transcoding is necessary, so just copy them to your scratch disk or media drive, organize a convenient folder structure: Acam, Bcam, Ccam, etc. Use the Media Browser to navigate to your new folders and drag the media into a blank area of the project pane to preserve the file structure.
8. When done editing, ypou may delete or archive the files from the scratch drive, as you already have the camera originals, organized and encapsulated as .dmgs.

(This is my own new “Best Practice” to follow based on all the posts I’ve read. COW Please feel free to append)

Phillip Todd
Cinematographer

https://vimeo.com/philliptodd

[Dale Roberts]

Hi Phillip,

Thanks so much for putting so much time into your answer!

I too will be doing MultiCam… and just did one- albeit with a C100 (AVCHD) and Go Pro as a wide shot.

And the go pro went off line and I had issues relinking it until PP just decided one day it was ok and it relinked…

A couple of questions if I may-

You said- 2. Open the SD card. Change “PRIVATE” to “private”, repeat for ‘AVCHD’ and ‘BDMV’ folders.

I’m assuming I would need to call AVCHD ‘avchd’ and ‘BDMV’ ‘bdmv’?

You said- 4. In “NameChanger.app” using the “Prepend” function change name of .MTS files from “0000.MTS” to “130627 PT int Acam 0000.MTS” (DATE + PROJECT NAME + CAM + FILE# ) or similar descriptive name for viewing in PPro timeline. (erase your mistakes using the “remove characters” function).

Do you manually rename EVERY clip? Or does the software then work it out for the other clips… I can typically have 500 clips or even 1000 if I go for big 2 cam shoots.

Lastly, as I shoot on the C100 I use Data Import Utility to rename the clips into a similar naming form as you have suggested… I think, from memory, it also then stitched together clips bigger than the 2gb file size limit… how do you get around this issue with your “namechanger” software/multicam issues?

My Multi Cam shoots in the future will involve a C100 and a 5D / Black Magic cam… If the planets align it will be 2 C100’s but they are not aligning yet!

I havent been using an NLE so intimately since the days of tape… so forgive me if my questions seem a little ‘dumb’… the past few years ingest operators have looked after this stuff for me… now that I am on my own its a big knowledge leap thats a little daunting!

Thanks again Phillip…

Dale

[Dale Roberts]

Oh one other thing Phillip…

I am assuming once you go to shoot again on the SD cards they will be reformatted with capitols again eg PRIVATE, AVCHD etc and then I would have to redo the above process yes?

Dale

[Phillip Todd]

[Dale Roberts] “I’m assuming I would need to call AVCHD ‘avchd’ and ‘BDMV’ ‘bdmv’?”
-Correct

[Dale Roberts] “Do you manually rename EVERY clip? Or does the software then work it out for the other clips… I can typically have 500 clips or even 1000 if I go for big 2 cam shoots.”

Rename them all manually? Incorrect, the app “NameChanger” (free) will batch rename your clips. You have to drag them into the window of “NameChanger.app”

[Dale Roberts] “C100 I use Data Import Utility to rename the clips into a similar naming form as you have suggested… I think, from memory, it also then stitched together clips bigger than the 2gb file size limit… how do you get around this issue with your “namechanger” software/multicam issues?”

My cameras didn’t come with a utility for Mac. Stick with yours, if it works. Stitching the spanned files together is a big plus.

[Dale Roberts] “I am assuming once you go to shoot again on the SD cards they will be reformatted with capitols again eg PRIVATE, AVCHD etc and then I would have to redo the above process yes?”

Yes, you have to redo it every time. AVCHD is a consumer format, Mac wants you to be able to view it but not get into it.

I am a DP so if someone here knows better, then please chime in.

Phillip Todd
Cinematographer

https://vimeo.com/philliptodd

[Dale Roberts]

Phillip,

Fantastic info… thankyou so much… I’ll do some tests very soon… I hope others get this info!

Many Thanks,
Dale

[Phillip Todd]

Glad to help as others have done for me. Let me know how it works out.

[Dale Roberts]

Hi Phillip,

I thought I would update you on what I am doing with AVCHD.

Ive done a few little tests…

I wanted to see what happens with this new folder situation with ML…

I couldnt rename the folders as you said for some reason so I just kept drilling down with “show package contents’ until I got to the openable Stream folder where I could see the clip names in the usual way.

Next I wanted to be able to link up separate clips.

I have the demo version of Clip Wrap so I used that. They link up nicely and import into Premiere easily. You can only do 1 min of footage in the demo… So I don’t know what it means for spanning clips as yet.

In my Data Import Utility it sorts spanning out automatically… aside from that it just renames clips and doesnt link them together. Interestingly I didnt have to fiddle with folders/doing the show clip contents move… Data Import just found them on its own.

But anyway, the plan would be to use Clip Wrap and bring in clips and link them together and then rename them to whatever I want as bigger clips after the Clip Wrap treatment.

I dont know how I might do this in a multi-cam world… only part of what I do is Multi-Cam. I guess I would just find the Multi-cam clips and do those as one file.

I do note tho that PP doesn’t really like long clips… scrubbing was VERY difficult. It froze most of the time… mind you that could be my Mac… it is a little old and slow!

So I am thinking there would be no probs with offline media relinking as now, they are just normal, renamed clips in a folder on my computer…

Thought you might be interested in this info…

cheers
dale

[Phillip Todd]

[Dale Roberts] “I couldnt rename the folders as you said for some reason”

-You were trying to do this directly on the SD card, right? You need to move the plastic switch on the SD card into the position that is not “Locked”.

[Dale Roberts] “In my Data Import Utility it sorts spanning out automatically… aside from that it just renames clips and doesnt link them together. Interestingly I didnt have to fiddle with folders/doing the show clip contents move… Data Import just found them on its own.”

-That sounds like good news. Maybe you should let the data import util bring in your clips, stitch together the spanned ones and then use “NameChanger” to batch rename them.

I have Clipwrap 2 and it can stitch together spanned files and just rewrap, not, transcode them. This would be plan B if you can’t get the end result you want from the Data Util.

Doesn’t Canon have a forum for C100 users struggling with the same issues?

[Dale Roberts] “I do note tho that PP doesn’t really like long clips… scrubbing was VERY difficult. It froze most of the time… mind you that could be my Mac… it is a little old and slow!”

You should post your system specs if you want people here to help. No one wants to stop to ask what you’ve got. Just include it in your posts.

[Dale Roberts] “So I am thinking there would be no probs with offline media relinking as now, they are just normal, renamed clips in a folder on my computer…”

-That sounds like you’ve got it figured out.

Phillip Todd
Cinematographer

https://vimeo.com/philliptodd

[Jason Van patten]

[Dale Roberts] ” I do note tho that PP doesn’t really like long clips… scrubbing was VERY difficult. It froze most of the time… mind you that could be my Mac… it is a little old and slow!”

It’s not your necessarily your Mac, but a well-known CS6 bug with spanned AVCHD clips. Adobe has announced that there will be a fix for it in the coming weeks. (FWIW, neither CS5.5 nor CC suffer the same issue). Shorter, unspanned AVCHD clips don’t appear to cause a problem with CS6. Just the longer ones.

[Becky]

I’m having the same problem. OS 10.8.4 does not recognize the file structure correctly of video sit on a Sony NEX Fs100 AVCHD files. When I import to premiere the clips show, but error messages for all saying file format not recognized. When I save and close the project and then reopen, all. Clips are offline and cannot be reconnected.