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Merging many 10-15 second clips off CF card into one long clip in FCP7
I shoot sports video. Recently using a card recorder (Sony HVR-MRC1K) attached to a Sony FX7, I recorded a football game onto DV Tape and CF card (in AVI format.) This involves lots of starting and stopping the recording.
After mounting the card in log and transfer I have 175 clips, each about 10-15 seconds in length. Is there any way to take these tiny clips and create one long (~50min) clip of the entire game that I can scrub through in FCP?
From this single long clip I would pull out subclips for different plays to be used in highlight tapes and such. If this were possible, it would save me huge amounts of capturing time. Help if you can. Thanks!
Ben
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7 Replies
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Select them all and drag them to a sequence. They should drop in alphabetical order. Use that sequence as a clip in the viewer. If sub clips are a problem from a nest, then export the sequence as a self contained movie and reimport.
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Tried nesting them. Subclips from the nest were an issue, so that method is out. I exported the sequence as a QT movie and re-imported. That worked, but added ~6min to the process (still a huge improvement over realtime capturing)
Now, what I was wondering, is there software available to stitch files together outside of FCP? Like straight from the card onto a harddrive in a format that FCP can edit immediately? Ideally I would like to say, “OK, stitch these 30 files together onto this drive as ‘Team A vs Team B’ then stitch these 35 files onto this drive as ‘Team C vs Team D.'” Hit a button and end up with a folder containing the files “Team A vs Team B” and “Team C vs Team D”
Is there a solution like that?
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Ok, so assuming this software exists, don’t you think it will also take 6 minutes? What magic do you think it will perform? The 6 minutes is basically the file system copying files, and however many seconds it took you to drag them to the timeline, which should be about what, 3 seconds?
I figure the 6 minutes is pretty much inconsequential compared to all the time scrubbing and sub clipping an entire game. Have you tried nesting and just using markers instead of sub clips?
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Bret, thanks for helping. Your original solution is working for me personally (exporting and re-importing), but it brought to light a new issue.
One of our clients wants a digital copy of games we film at giant events on site (sometimes ~20-30 games in a day.) Ideally, I was hoping to be able to take a card with 3-4 games on it and create for them simple files (game by game) on their drive that they can use for their own purposes, then copy those files onto my own drive for my own purposes (editing in FCP.)
Also, the equipment present may not always have FCP (expensive.) That’s why that software would be so handy, something that could stitch these 30 files together as this and those 30 together as that ready to edit in FCP or just watch in QT.
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You can use QT Pro. $30. Just open the first clip and move the playhead to the end of the clip. Then highlight your other clips and drag into the open QT window. Save as a self contained movie just like in FCP. Done.
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Did that, it worked and the file plays fine in QT, but when I bring it into FCP and put the clip onto the timeline it behaves strangely. The audio appeared to be out of sync. After toiling around trying to figure out what was going on I noticed that the file I was working with in my FCP browser didn’t end on the same frame as when I played that exact file in QT. The FCP version has the same duration but the video ends ~30sec before the QT version (meaning that the final frame of the FCP version which appears 37:18 appears at 36:56 in the QT version)
Here’s the strangest part, I marked out the last 5 seconds of my FCP version (a five second shot of a soccer team preparing for a free kick with OUT OF SYNC audio, one of the last plays of the game) when I exported that selection from FCP and played that file it shows the team passing the ball around after the game is over with audio IN SYNC.
I know this looks confusing, but please bear with me. Here are the settings I used in QT to export:
Video-
Compression: DV/DVCPRO-NTSC
Quality: Best
Scan Mode: Interlaced
Aspect Ratio: 16:9
Dimensions: 720×480 (853×480)
(Compressor Native)Sound-
Format: Integer (Little Endian)
Sample Rate: 48.000 kHz
Sample Size: 16-bit
Channels: Stereo (L R)Thanks
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Wait, you’re originally using AVI? Mac and AVI just never have gotten along. I don’t think any QT solution is going to work right. I think you might want to install windows on your system and try some sort of windows solution. I don’t know. AVI?
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