formatted OSX drive, filesalvaged MXF files, now FCP?

[Jeremy Garchow]

MXF4mac has a tool that comes with MXFImport called MXF INfo LIght (they also have a very expensive analyzer that will do wht you need, I think. How small is oyur smallest mxf file? If you upload one, I can try the MXF INof Light and tell you what I see.

Jeremy

[Jeremy Garchow]

Acutally, MXF Info Light is free. You can open an MXF file and as long of the essence of the file is not damaged, you should be able to see what it is:

https://mxf4mac.com/mxf-info

Jeremy

[Jay Ingles]

Hi Jeremy. That was a huge help. Thanks

I feel i can really make some progress soon. I’ve posted some screengrabs incase this helps understand the situation more.

Through MXFinfo i could read a lot of information about a clip but wanted to ask how the “UMID” tag could be of use.

I think im going to go through each clip with MXFinfo and rename each file from what it says [ie: “0014HZ.mxf” in this case/example]. After that i’ll run Raylight on a handful of clips at a time (bc it crashes on the 500+ batch) and hopefully retrieve some valuable video.

Does MXFinfo state if its the audio MXF? From the random ones i chose i only believe it was for video clips but i may be misinterpreting. Example 1 says its got 6 tracks, but i know when i open with raylight its a video file. confusing.

example 1: MXFinfo retrieved info from restored 544.mxf file
https://www.neverinneutral.com/editor/0014HZ.jpg

example 2: list of restored files from FileSalvage
https://www.neverinneutral.com/editor/FileSalvage-Restore.jpg

example 3: Raylight restored videos (no sound, 10s only..demo)
https://www.neverinneutral.com/editor/Raylight-restored.jpg

This last part of the process has been invaluable. thanks!
any farther thoughts? If i’ve got to buy software I’d rather buy HDLog bc i could use it in the future. Tried P2LogPro demo clip repair but it gave me a new p2volume that wasn’t ingestible by FCP.

Thanks a whole lot guys shane & jeremy!

jay

[Jeremy Garchow]

OK. You can tell if it’s video by what it says for ‘Essence containers’. If it’s audio, then it would say “AES Clip Wrapped”. But the good thing is that the clip name seems to be stored in the essence as well. So now you have to find the audio files that match your original file name, the audio file will come up as the same file name (in your csae 0014HZ) in MXF Info Light and then it would tell you that it’s “AES Clip Wrapped”, that is IF FileSalvage was able to salvage the audio files. If you do find audio file, then you would rename your video file to 0014HZ.MXF and then name the audio files 0014HZ00.MXF through 0014HZ03.MXF. The audio channels are marked as 00-03 for four tracks of audio. Once you find the audio, whatever MXF plugin you use should be able to join the clips. I think for MXFImport, you would have to recreate a P2 card with AUDIO and VIDEO folders inside of a CONTENTS folder. I would not suggest P2Log as this won’t do anyting for you in this case. I know MXFImport is expensive, but it’s worth every penny. They will also be coming out with a P2 metadata editor that was shown at NAB that is going to be totally kick butt.

https://mxf4mac.com/p2-flow

Let me know what you find out.

Jeremy

[Jay Ingles]

thanks again jeremy.

I’ve gone through all the files with MXFInfo and labelled them in their alpha numeric namings (with the addition of 00-03 for audio files). Raylight crashed A LOT when doing a batch so i’d have to drag a couple files into an empty folder and rescan every time. This seemed to work quite well (even tho time consuming). In this way raylight would tell me if it was skipping a file bc it was AUDIO, and at that point i’d rename those files 00-03 and move them to an AUDIO Directory. Fortunately FILESALVAGE (which rescued the files) pulled everything and numbered them sequentially which turned out that the first 4 in a series were audio 1-4 and hte last was the video track.

Using RAYLIGHT i’ve been able to convert almost all of the MXF-Video files to be openable in FCP…which has been great amount of progress on this end. (thanks to yourself and shane)

Now i swore i had raylight able to interpret the MXF audio & video files and make a QT that played back both but not sure what i did to do that.

Im going to keep playing there to sort that out.

I like the idea of working straight from the P2 directories bc it’ll save a lot of media space, but am thinking about how this will affect me when i archive a project and move it to a backup drive. Worried that a relinking of MXF’s down hte road might run into issues. Have you heard anything on these forums about this? No need to respond if you’re busy, im almost there.

thanks again! i owe you a case of beer.
/j

jay

[Jeremy Garchow]

[jay ingles] “Now i swore i had raylight able to interpret the MXF audio & video files and make a QT that played back both but not sure what i did to do that. “

Raylight makes QT reference movies that you then import to FCP. The reference movie points to the audio and video MXFs and the FCP ‘sees’ them as one QT file.

[jay ingles] “Worried that a relinking of MXF’s down hte road might run into issues. Have you heard anything on these forums about this?”

With Raylight, since it makes QT reference movies, anytime that you move those files from the directory to which the were created, you lose the relationship to the reference movie and you have to run Raylight again, then relink in FCP to those new reference movies. Not a huge deal, but something to consider. With MXF4mac, since it is using the actual MXF file and not a reference movie, you simply relink back to the media just as you would a QT movie or any other media asset in FCP.

Jeremy

[Bjoern Adamski]

Hi Jay,

the UMID is equal for P2 video and audio clips that belong together, as well as for spanned clips. Our importer reads the UMID and maps it to QuickTime. A little tool could merge the clips and send them to FCP similar to P2 Flow/P2 Flow CM. We didn’t do this yet by ourselves, it will maybe become a feature within P2 Flow but I am not sure if we can make it for v1.0. However it can be done. You might contact us regarding your issue.

Thanks
Bjoern

———————
Product Manager
MXF4mac
https://mxf4mac.com

[Jay Ingles]

thanks for the detailed response Bjoern. I am very interested in mxf4mac but found it outside of my price point being that im dealing with a peculiar/uncertain problem that might not be resolved with software bc of damaged files.

appreciated.
/j

jay