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“unable to import clips” – Urgent problem
Hi,
I recently bought the XDCAM-EX1, and have filmed one month in China. Now I want to import the clips into fcp. During the filming I used Sony’s “Clip Browser” to import the clips onto my harddrive. Rather than load them directly onto the harddrive, I imported through the clip browser. Now I need those clips to be accessible in final cut, and have downloaded the “XDCAM Transfer” to do this. But when I try to add the folders with my clips, it is unable to recognize any of the involved clips. Even though the folder contains plenty of clips, the transfer programme writes “0 clips” when I add the folder in question.
I have also tried to use the “log and transfer” function in FCP, but this doesn’t work either. When I try to import, I get the following message; “XDCAM EX_1″ contains unsupported media or has an invalid directory structure. Please choose a folder whose directory structure matches supported media.”
Two days ago I received some help from one of the main danish experts on xdcam etc. He couldn’t solve the problem, until he finally reliazed that using the “split” function in the clip browser, and thereby reorganize the clips, actually solved the problem.
Or so we thought… I managed to import 1/4 of the video files, but is unable to import the rest into FCP. I’ve tried reorganizing the files in various ways, but nothing helps.
Please help me out here. I start editing tomorrow, and will loose a lot of money and time if this isn’t solved fast.
Best,
Andreas Dalsgaard
Danish documentary filmmaker -
4 Replies
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Each BPAV should be in its own folder. Use XDCAM Transfer tool 2.7. Ideally you should be using ClipBrowser2, not the older version 1.
You haven’t explained how you’ve organized your BPAV folders so it’s very hard to make suggestions.
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Great to hear from you. I’m pretty distressed here!!!
I have imported directly through clip browser 1 (although I do have downloaded 2 by now). The clips have been sorted in bpav folders through by the clip browser. What happened was, that a large amount of clips were organized in one big folder. Then at some point the programme told me, that this folder couldn’t contain any more clips. After that, I organized the rest of the footage in smaller folders around 25gb. I have been able to import these later clips into the xdcam transfer, and further into FCP, but not the footage from the original folder.
The clip browser can both split and combine folders. I have tried to split the bpav into separate folders with a maximum of 10 GB. Then I tried to import these folders separately into XDCAM transfer. That worked for the later clips from my footage, but not for the main bulk. I have tried many different folder sizes, but nothing works. The later clips only worked, after I made them smaller than 10 GB. All the time I have been combining and splitting through clip browser and not manually.
Now I have combined the footage in one bit folder again. It is organized in a pbav, which contains an CLPR with all the clips, plus an empty TAKR folder and CUEUP and MEDIAPRO XML files. All the clips are in separate subfolders under the CLPR, with each folder containing the MP4 file plus SMI, PPN, XML and BIM. In total I have 541 separate clips with a total of 300GB.
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I believe Clip Browser 1 had a serious bug when creating new BPAV folders. I reported this to Sony some time back. It was fixed in Clip Browser 2.
I wouldn’t be surprised that Clip Browser 1 created defective BPAV folders. By “eye” they look fine but apparently were missing crucial data that XDCAM Transfer needed and therefore wouldn’t recognize the clips.
Unfortunately by you can’t tell which BPAV folders are defective.
While I had no major issue splitting BPAV in CB1 I had not attempted to combine BPAV. I did find that when I imported an MP4 and created a new BPAV the the BPAV CB1 created was defective. I have a hunch that CB1 may also be creating defective BPAV folders when combining. If I understand you, you combined BPAV in CB1 and I think that is the root of the issue.ClipBrowser2 IS able to take the MP4 and create new viable BPAV folders. It creates new meta data but, in the end, you’ll have clips you can use with XDCAM Transfer to rewrap as MOV for FCP.
Depending on the results of the next question I’ll make a suggestion.
Using CB2, can it see all the BPAV folders and the clips in them?
If so, you may attempt to split them into separate 8GB BPAVsIf CB2 can NOT see all the BPAV folders and their clips then import each individual MP4 (Use CB2 Import feature to import individual MP4 clips) and then create new BPAV under 8GB. Doing this you’ll be loosing your meta data but the new BPAVs should work.
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Dear Craig,
You are my new hero!!! Fantastic – worked right away after days of distress
Andreas
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