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Canon c300 footage not combining/merging in Premiere Pro CC SOMETIMES
I’m using Adobe Premiere Pro CC on an iMac & I shot a bunch of interviews with two Canon c300s. There were two weekends and different c300’s were rented.
a little background: the c300 automatically divides long files up to about 5’15” chunks in order to do something. I’m sure there’s a smart and logical reason.
Then here’s what happened.
When I imported or used the Media Browser in CC to get the footage, for the most part, Premiere BEAUTIFULLY recognized almost all the interviews as a single, long file. It brought the footage in, and the audio synched. It was glorious.
Except for ONE of the cameras on ONE of the days – for some god-awful reason those files are staying separate. Honestly, I was originally thinking, “whatever, I’ll just bring them in as separate MXF files and just line them up back to back.” That was working. For a while.
Suddenly, I’m finding that Premiere is getting the clips confused, and what was originally a 30 minute interview is now the same 5’15” clip repeated 6 times with different names.
Sometimes it does it. Sometimes it doesn’t. Any clue on how to either consolidate that MXF into one pretty package or to make Premiere stop doing that? (since I’m using multiple cameras, and I’m in Premiere CC, I’d prefer not to convert the footage to another format)
THANKS!
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4 Replies
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The reason it records that way is a limitation of the file system used on the CF cards (FAT32). So it has to break it up since the file system can’t understand a file being bigger than 2GB in size. Yes, it’s 2013 and we’re still dealing with this problem! Ridiculous IMHO.
Premiere tries to make this easy by reading the card structure and parsing the XML file that’s on the card. That XML tells a given piece of software (Prelude, Premiere, Media Encoder, Canon’s own XF Utility, etc.) where to find the clips, how to link them together, and how long each clip is. If that XML gets ignored, misinterpreted or corrupted then thing like what you see (clip 1 repeated for the duration of your interview) is what happens.
The best fix I’ve found is to use something else to ingest the footage and transcode it (ProRes or DNxHD are the most common mezzanine formats, and would mix seamlessly with your other footage). So you can try Prelude or directly into AME to transcode. If neither of those work, then you’ll need to get your hands on Canon’s XF Utility (available as a download from their site) and from within there you can spit out each MXF file as it’s own standalone file (meaning it doesn’t reference any XML file, it’s just a self-contained MXF that any system could read – Premiere, Avid, Smoke, etc.).
I’ve had this happen with our C300 more than once. Your data should still be in tact….you just need to quite relying on Premiere to parse it correctly. Sometimes Premiere just can’t seem to get this right. At that point transcode to an intermediate format or spit out standalone MXF’s and you’ll be back on the road.
Ryan Holmes
http://www.ryanholmes.me
@CutColorPost -
Thanks for the insight. This really helped me to understand where the issue was. And I found that:
If I moved (I didn’t trash) the XML file that came with the footage to a different folder so it wasn’t read by Premiere, then trash the .xmp .cfa and .pek files created by Premiere on the initial import, the footage was read cleanly by Premiere and although it’s still separate clips, they’re at least the RIGHT separate clips and not reading as the same.
Timecode isn’t right, but I can live with that since we never jammed timecode on that day anyway.
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Glad you got it to work!
I’d like to see the day when we ditch this 2GB file size limit junk. But until then….
Ryan Holmes
http://www.ryanholmes.me
@CutColorPost -
Hi Daniel
Rather late but….I have the same problem running off a NAS but works fine from external hard or internal drive. The solution I’ve found is to run CC in version 7.1.0. Everything works fine in this version and we just keep trying each update to see if the problem has been fixed again, if not we roll back to 7.1.0.
Strange that the issue has only come about after this update. Anyway, hope this might help you or anything else that stumbles across this feed.
Chris
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