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Panasonic P2 transcoded file crashing FCP/Quicktime
The company I work for has recently upgraded to an HD tape-less workflow using Panasonic P2.
We shoot avc intra 50.
Offload to our GB Labs SPACE raid using shot put pro and panasonic 5 card reader.
Ingest as Native avc intra into FCP (7) using log and transfer, NOT prores.We shoot for long periods as the majority of our work is event based.
We have had a couple of occasions where files created using this method seem to be corrupt which manifests in either FCP hanging and needing a force quit or just crashing completely. These files also seem to crash Quicktime player. the error is timecode specific, i.e. the application will crash at the same point each time corrupt clip is viewed.
Any thoughts as to what could be causing this?
I plan on checking our crude database to see whether the clips with errors have been recorded on the same card but i don’t know this now.
Mike
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6 Replies
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Try bringing in the troubled clip as ProRes…instead of AVCIntra native. See if that helps.
Shane
Little Frog Post
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def -
Thanks Shane,
I’ll give that a go when I get chance…still need to check the s/n of the card and see whether the issues we are having seem related in any way.
Mike -
So…today I found another file with the same issue and this time it was definitely from a different P2 card so that rules one thing out.
I tried transcoding another AVCIntra 50 file using same time codes and had the same issue.
On this occasion i could actually see an error in the image. It’s a little difficult for me to upload images due to not having permission from those being filmed, although I could photoshop all the faces i guess.
I then transcoded to ProRes and the file seems ok at the same timecode. No idea if it’s ok throughout.
Any ideas what could be causing this kind of issue?
Mike
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FCP, while it can ingest and work with AVCIntra natively, there are no sequence presents for AVCintra. So it might just need to be converted to ProRes, so FCP can understand it better. It’s like…it’s OK that it has to hang out with AVCIntra…but it prefers ProRes, that’s like it’s BFF! So it will only be cordial with AVCintra. And not play nice sometimes.
Shane
Little Frog Post
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def -
Yeh, i get that Shane.
I’d really like to know why/how these files are corrupt in case there is anything we can do to fix the problem in future. The MXF files must all be fine or surely the transcode to ProRes wouldn’t work either.
The issues with using ProRes are that the file sizes are substantially larger. We are already backing up the data tranfered to the RAID using ShotPutPro to LTO and then also backing up the files created from using Log and Transfer to another LTO – that’s currently our redundancy.As we are currently recording AVCIntra50 these file sizes aren’t too bad but having done a few tests they would be getting on for twice the size if injested using ProRes. Even LT files were a lot larger than the native AVCIntra.
Now i know you can’t have it all but AVCIntra is supposed to work so any help in working out why any of these files seem to be corrupt would be much appreciated.
As a slight aside but still related due to the issue – I’ve been looking at options like Virtual MXF so that we don’t need to worry about transcoding at all but as the pro version isn’t available I’m not sure that’s an options just yet. We have multiple angles for all our work so I guess we’d need multiple mounts to facilitate such.
That or going don the premier pro route for native workflow.
Any thoughts to any of the above?
Mike
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The only native MXF apps I trust are Calibrated and MXF4Mac.
Or switch to PPro, as it is moving forward with updates and features, and FCP 7 is EOL
Shane
Little Frog Post
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def
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