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Media100 to cut a bunch of footage
Hi all,
I recently came into the possession of 6 to 8 terabytes of SD ProRes 422 (HQ) digitized footage of television recordings. The media format is overkill for the source material, and I want to cut out the clips I want to keep, and dispose of the rest to free up the space. Would any veteran Media100 editors have tips on a good workflow for this?
I’ll essentially be bringing these files into a bin which each can be from 3 to 8 hours of footage, and I mostly just want to rescue the commercials. Should I use markers, sub-clips, trim tools…? Or drop a clip onto the timeline, split it there, and render out individual files from there?
I’m interested to try this in the next couple of weeks, while my demo period is still good (Media 100’s website says 60 days, but the software says 15 or 16 days… hmm), and if it works well, I’ll drop the $99…
For the record, this isn’t my first spin with Media100 — ten+ years ago, I helped out a local WEVA guy who used his Media100 system as a retiree’s pastime/extra income/artistic outlet… but I don’t remember much about workflows, anymore.
Any tips appreciated!
thanks!(edit: I’ve discovered some joys in Edit Clip mode, setting markers and in & out points, and then dragging-n-dropping from the Edit Suite window to the Bin window and renaming the new item…)
(edit2: and I can run “Conform selected clips…” to convert a dragged-and-dropped clip into a ProRes 422 _non-HQ_ format file…)
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5 Replies
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Tim, don’t complicate the process. You were on the right track in opening a programme and dragging clips onto the timeline and selecting your material from there. Just fast scroll until you come to what you want to keep, cut, scroll through what you want, cut again and lift off the media between the cuts and put it into a separate bin .
Others may suggest using only the edit window but that’s fiddly with the amount of footage you have to scroll through. A programme timeline is far simpler and you can see what you’re doing so much more easily.
Michael Slowe
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Thanks Michael.
As it stands, I can’t seem to find any combination of settings which will let me work with these clips without rendering new audio tracks for each one. A 212GB ProRes 422 HQ file with 24-bit 48k audio will take “about 11 hours” for Media100 to come to terms with its audio. Because I am unwilling to spend that much time, disk space, and disk I/O on render churn, I’m not sure Media100 will work for this project.
It might be worth noting: if I “Stop” the audio track import, I can still work with the clip in the edit window, but if I drag it into a program, it only has as much audio as Media100 rendered before I hit stop.
Having worked with many other Mac audio and video programs, I imagine what’s going on may be one of the following: (1) Media100 doesn’t want to work with multiplexed audio/video files and needs audio to be in their own separate stem files, or (2) Media100 doesn’t like that the audio streams are 24-bit and is converting them to 16-bit.
Thanks again
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Media 100 does create its own separate audio tracks – one for each channel – from the source media.
You can see the results in the “Media 100 Media Folders” folder – usually there’s a subfolder in there for your project, =).
Then you can figure out if those files being created are 16bit or 24bit (they will open in Quicktime Player 7 where you can see stats via view->show movie inspector).
Either way, they’ll be separate files.Sometimes the rendering of them is much quicker than the written estimate, especially given modern processors and ssds.
Try it with a clip of modest length, and see how long it takes, and then scale that time figure up, for a more realistic estimate of the total time cost for your project. -
I agree with Andrew, the initial indication of likely time for an operation very often turns out to be ridiculously pessimistic. Give it 15 minutes or so and then see what time is indicated.
Michael Slowe
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Tim, I wonder how you came out on this project and if you were able to use M100 do do what you wanted.
Another option might have been to load the clip into Quicktime Player (or Pro) first and use Quicktime’s ability to edit/trim and save out the portions that you needed.
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