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Importing Content from Mac to Win Machine
I am having trouble retrieving media. I am using Premiere Pro 2015.
First, let me set the scene. It was a live shoot with three cameras. The signals from the cameras ran through a switch and a director choose the best shot. In turn the output of the switch ran to two screen along the stage AND to a recorder. The output of the switch was loaded on external media through a Mac. The operator is very experienced and the content was visible on his machine. Media content was long, about two and a half hours. We have done this in the past but on SD and DV tape.
The cameras were AVCHD and their cards imported perfectly.
The output of the switch is the problem. It would save a considerable amount of time if I could simple use the output of the switch, filling in with camera output when necessary. The content from the switch was transferred to a SSD and an external hard drive. The SSD thin Hard drive media is ExFat formatted and has the file in ProRes. The Western Digital USB external hard drive is Apple formatted H.264 file. The content from the SSD is extremely “artifacty” and choppy. The sound is horrible. On attempting import, Premiere reported a “generic error.”
The content on the portable hard drive is not accessible at all.Attempts to import into AE also failed. I installed the trial version of Mac Drive. (This allows you to see Mac formatted content but not import it.) Mac Drive could see nothing on the hard drive. If I buy a copy of Mac Drive I might be able to import content from SSD. (?)
Needless to say, this is very frustrating. I am thinking that the easiest thing for me to do is to have my guy create a Blu-Ray. Then import from that. But I am open to any and all suggestions. Thank you very much.
My computer:
i7-3930 CPU @3.20 GHz; 32 GBs RAM; Win7 Pro, Service Pack 1; 64 bit OS; NVIDIA Quadro K2000 -
7 Replies
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If you could get the ProRes file transferred to an HFS+ drive, MacDrive might be able to read it.
Otherwise I’d say you may want a Mac that can read the ExFat drive to get on a network with the Windows machine and transfer it that way.
TimK,
Director, Consultant
Video Producer at I-CAR -
Tim Kolb,
Thanks for your kind answer.
We shall look into your suggestions.
How about making a BluRay of the footage and using the files like you do with a DVD and VOBs? -
What version of windows? Some can read exfat alright and some can’t.
Also, if you’re importing PRO-RES to Windows editors, you’re SOL. Pro-res is an APPLE codec. If you used the latest pro-res, just convert it on a mac to a compatible format. Old pro-res can load on windows through ffmpeg, but not well, and you’ll have to do some haxie to get it in adobe premiere.
H.264 is low bit-rate. even blu-ray is not more than 20-30mbps at the most extreme. Hell, DVD, even in mpeg2 is only 8.5mpbs for video.
Pro-res is upwards of 50mbps, so of course it’s “Choppy”. It’s not compressed.
My advice to you is to Convert the file to something windows compatible. AVI, WMV, MP4, MPG, H.264 are the types you want to look at. If you want less compression, try AVC-Intra, at 100 for quality. Then create a sequence from just that file, render it’s previews (set to iframe only mpeg), and drop that sequence where you need the video. It will allow fast preview playback, and you can play with that sequence as if it’s a sub clip, and easily make dupes with different in\out points for different sub clips.General error is a video format error, usually. If your system shoots up a box (windows system error at the top of it) that says error with a -1 somewhere in it, it’s a drive error or failure. Remember that, while you can read from an SSD at 512mbit\sec, your video processor can only handle about 40mbit\sec max, and less if there’s audio.
If you can get your pro-res loaded (you probably never will), you can speed up playback by rendering previews of it in it’s own sequence (outside of your main one), which you can then place anywhere you need. Keep the Previews to Iframe Mpeg for speed, and they should look pretty good coming from a Pro-res.
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Thank you for answering my question.
As I said above, the OS is Win 7 service pack 1.I installed ProRes for Windows…I don’t understand why you say it can’t work.
Again, would a simple workaround be to make a BluRay then open it up and take the files. Used to do that with DVDs.
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What are you talking about? Premiere (and just about anything) can play ProRes on Windows.
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[Ht Davis] “If you can get your pro-res loaded (you probably never will)”
You have zero idea what you’re talking about. Apple themselves have this encoder for Prores if for some reason you can’t open Prores on the host application https://support.apple.com/kb/DL2?locale=en_US
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[Ht Davis] “f you got it to run, good for you, but you probably talk about proxies for editing”
We have about 30 Windows workstations in our office. Every single one of them can run prores without any special hardware, which is neat because our clients use a lot of prores stuff.
[Ht Davis] “444 hi-quality files which are huge bandwidth”
Ummm, actually no. One stream of Prores 4444 is about 33 MB/s which is manageable as your normal hard drive can spin in the 100 MB/s speeds. If you edit a bunch of multicam stuff then you might need a RAID. Read the white paper.
[Ht Davis] “Even with all that, your video card should be extremely high end, at least 1-2gb vram while your main system is quad core with 12-24gb ram”
Nope.
[Ht Davis] “if you have cs6 or lower you need to hack like hell to get adobe to recognize prores for editing, and thats buggy at best.”
Installing the Apple decoder works because it uses the Quicktime arcitechture. Same thing with all Quicktime codecs like DNxHD.
[Ht Davis] “go ram another pole up your ass.”
Good day to you too. Stop spreading misinformation.
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