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Log & Transfer problem with Canon Vixia HF 10 (AVCHD)
Anybody seen this before?
My wife has a Canon HF10 (like the HV20 except it records to Flash memory) that she uses to document progress in her classroom. It records in AVCHD in 1080/60i as near as I can tell.
I have edited some material for her in the past and importing the footage has never been easy. Today it turned out to be impossible.
The problem is not in the transcoding the AVCHD to ProRes; it’s in loading the clips into the Log & Transfer window in the first place.
Here’s what happens. With the camera already plugged in, when I open the L & T window, Final Cut spots the camera right away and I get an external drive icon and the message “CANON: Adding. . . ” appears with a spinning clock. And it spins and spins and spins.
After 20-30 minutes (sometimes 45), thumbnails of clips begin to populate the L & T bin. There are usually several instances of the spinning beach ball of death before all the clips show up. In the past, it’s taken best part of an hour, but eventually all the clips show up and once the beach ball goes away, I can drag clips to the project window and the transcoding proceeds without a problem.
But today, L & T keeps insisting there are 10 clips on the camera (when I happen to know there are only six), it loads thumbnails for perhaps 3 or 4 of them (but shows accurate durations for 5 or 6) and then won’t allow me to drag any clips to the project window (cursor turns to beach ball if I do).
I should mention that the clips are pretty large, 3.5-4 GB each (she sets up the camera and lets it roll for an entire math lesson–maybe 30-40 minutes per clip).
I’ve trashed prefs, repaired permissions, even did software updates on ProApps and the OS without any improvement.
Any clues? Any suggestions?
8 core/3.0MHz/4GB/FCS2 (FCP 6.0.1)
TIA,
Mike Raff
Richmond, VA -
1 Reply
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Had same issues with my Vixia HF100. A maddening detail Canon neglects to tell you is that longer clips are split. Not in the camera’s viewfinder playback – it’ll obligingly and secretly stitch the split clips together and play them seamlessly…the only hint is your noted discrepancy between number of MTS files.
You need to join the files back together, something I found on Voltaic’s site which now mysteriously only has the “why,” but no longer has the instructions on how… fortunately I saved them, though you’re SOL if you’re not on a mac.File joining on the Mac
The Mac solution requires running a command under the Terminal. Many users will not have had to do this before, but don’t worry – its easy. Just follow these steps.Open a Terminal window. The Terminal application can be found in your Applications folder under Utilities
Go to the directory where your spanned clips are located. You will need to use the Unix change directory command ‘cd’
cd Movies/MyAVCHDclips
{i.e., ‘cd’ followed by path to your MTS files, using / between folders/file}Enter the following command and press Enter:
cat file001.MTS file002.MTS > newfile.MTS
{where file001.MTS and file002.MTS are your files to be joined.}This will take a while! Leave it for at least an hour before checking on your results.
{Note- for me, it only took a few minutes}Hope this helps.
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