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Canon EOS Movie Plugin-E1 – batch capture trouble
A bit of background: We’ve been using the Canon FCP plugin since it first came out with good success – we’ve been working with an offline-online workflow for documentary projects where we capture hours of 7D and 5D footage through Log and Transfer as ProRes Proxy, edit to locked creative cut, media manage with handles, and batch capture through L&T the used footage to ProResHQ for online and finish. Pretty slick – main complaint has been how slow the L&T process is vs. Compressor or Grinder – we’re seeing about 1/2 realtime, even on our 8-core Mac Pros (takes 2 hours to transcode 1 hour of footage)
So in September, Canon released the update to the E1 plugin, bringing it to version 1.1. The new version promised multi-core processing, so we jumped at the chance to update and take advantage of that new feature. Unfortunately, we saw no improvement in transcoding time, even with Quick Cluster set up, core utilization is abysmal.
We have now locked cuts on a few episodes and were set to do our standard batch capture to ProResHQ and have run into some big trouble.
Note: These projects have some media that was processed with v1 of the plugin and some that was processed with v1.1, since it all came in over a span of months over the last year.
We have found that v1.1 will not batch capture footage that was originally captured with v1, and v1 will not batch capture footage that was originally captured with v1.1. In both scenarios, the reels will mount, but we get the error “The volumes listed below are missing. Please mount them to continue re-importing media”
This basically renders our previously smooth workflow into a complex process where we have to re-install the v1 plugin (luckily we happened to find an old version, since it’s no longer publicly available), capture the v1-originated footage, uninstall the v1 plugin (not very elegant, involved tracking down the files buried in a plugin folder and deleting them), reinstall the v1.1 plugin, capture the v1.1 originated footage, rinse, repeat. Ugh.
Trying to do this in a systematic way where multiple shows and segments need to be finished at varying times is maddening, exacerbated by the fact that there’s no easy way to find out which version of the plug-in was used to process which footage (or even which version of the plugin is installed on any given machine that you’re sitting in front of).
Anyone out there seen this or come across a solution? We’ve tried trashing preferences and reinstalling the plugins in various orders, with no luck.
Help?
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3 Replies
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Canon should be told about this if they have introduced a lack of backward compatibility. I don’t know what else to advise but thanks for the heads up.
I also don’t understand how Canons plugin would utilise more cores as L&T is part of FCP which limits processing cores and RAM
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I am in the quite same trouble. I’ve noticed that the problem came from moved footage. The Canon E1 plug doesn’t accept moving the copied cards. Have you found some solution?
Any idea?
Many thanks in advance! regards!
Paul -
Hello,
I’ve encountered the same onlining problems and found only this solution:
1) Mount all the volumes that contain the clips you want to online within the Log and Transfer tool
2) Close the Log and Transfer tool.
3) Mark the the clips in your bin that you want to online and choose batch capture.
On my machine (Mac Pro with OS 10.5.8 and EOS plugin v1.1) the plugin seems to be unable to search for the volumes itself – you have to mount them first. I’ve tried with v1.0 there is the same problem. Oddly, it works perfectly for new clips which I’ve onlined for testing reasons but for my old project it doesn’t work but only with the workflow mentioned above.
Best wishes,
Paul.
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