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Repairing captured video
My question is whether there is a tool that identifies and fixes problems with original captured video.
I was given many hours of video (of university course lectures) captured directly to a Mac disk in Quicktime H.264 format, about 230 MB per hour. I’m doing mild editing, deleting dead time, occasionally imposing a fade, and inserting a jpeg title at the start. When I output to QuickTime prior to invoking Compressor, the file is about 600 MB, and I compress to about 100 MB.
In more than half the videos, no problem, but in other videos when outputting from FCP to Quicktime I get General Error, or General Error (34), and the file is full length but Movie Player only shows the 5 seconds of the title.
I may have narrowed down the problem to the original video I was given, which occasionally seems to have something wrong in the data. The original plays okay in Movie Player, and displays okay in FCP. Binary chops on in/out revealed in at least one case that deleting a single frame made it possible to output a playable Quicktime file. In other cases I found that selecting everything in the sequence and pasting into a new sequence (and rerendering) fixed the problem.
Is there a tool for finding and fixing captured video? Thanks.
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3 Replies
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FCP simply does not recognize h.264 as an editing codec at this time. The only way you will avoid problems editing h.264 files is to transcode to a “realtime” editing format recognized as such by FCP.
Yes, I know that sounds like a pain in butt, but not transcoding is a much, much bigger pain, I assure you.
Your best bet is ProRes, as that handles both SD and HD.
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los AngelesPOST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™
EPK Colorist – UP IN THE AIR – nominated for six academy awards
A forum host of Creative COW’s Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, Indie Film & Documentary, and Film History & Appreciations forums.
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Thanks much for the advice. I’m new to FCP, so I have two follow-on questions:
1) You say, “FCP simply does not recognize h.264 as an editing codec at this time,” yet in my ignorance I’ve been doing a lot of editing successfully, so evidently FCP does recognize it. Do you mean, “Trying to use h.264 as an editing codec will lead to trouble?”
2) Could you please tell me how I would “transcode” using ProRes? Is this an option in FCP, or some other application I need to get? I don’t understand what the workflow would be. Is this something I would do in Compressor, then import the resulting file into my timeline?
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Bruce,
Trust me, the reason you had to ask for help in this case is because MP4 is not recognized by FCP as an editing codec. It may slip in under the radar and allow you to do some things that might make you think you’re actually editing MP4, but since you can’t accomplish anything successfully, is that really editing?
In addition, you will soon become familiar with those codecs recognized as “realtime codecs” in FCP, because those will playback without rendering if your sequence settings are set properly to match. (Let FCP make those settings automatically and you can’t go wrong — try to set them yourself and you can easily screw up.
[Bruce Sherwood] “Could you please tell me how I would “transcode” using ProRes?”
Compressor is a great place to start, and you should master it, because you will need to. You can set it up to batch transcode all of you files and then walk away and enjoy your weekend.
MPEG Streamclip, a freebie available all over the Web is good too, and it possibly has a bit faster rendering engine. For all the things you do in that app you simply choose the the Export to QT function and set the options to ProRes or whatever other codec you want. BTW, if you ever have to rip a DVD for editing the app all of us professionals use is MPEG Streamclip.
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los AngelesPOST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™
EPK Colorist – UP IN THE AIR – nominated for six academy awards
A forum host of Creative COW’s Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, Indie Film & Documentary, and Film History & Appreciations forums.
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