[John-michael Seng-wheeler]

[gary adcock] “As has been mentioned here, this issue only affects 2012 MBP’s running the latest 10.8.2 & latest TB firmware update. “

This was just posted to CML:

——————————————-

All of a sudden my 17″ macbook pro won’t read SxS cards in the 34 slot.

It appears that 10.8.2 breaks the SxS driver.

Has anyone heard if Sony/Apple are working on a fix?

Michael J Sanders:
London Based DP/Cameraman

online reel: https://www.mjsanders.co.uk M: 07976 269818 twitter: #hackneydp

——————————————–

So it would apear the problem affects older Macs as well.

[John-michael Seng-wheeler]

If you search the keyboard shortcuts for “Reveal in Project” you will find it. Prior to CS6 it was “M” but that shortcut is now add marker.

Command+Shift+F is unused, you could map it… or you could use Shift+F which is currently “Select Find Box”

[John-michael Seng-wheeler]

That’s because the audio tracks were linked to each other. Once you unlinked them from each other, you could link all of them together with the video. I wish it wasn’t that way, but it is.

[John-michael Seng-wheeler]

If you have your Pixel aspect ratio correct (which is what Vince suggested you check) you might also be running across the problem that, while 16:9 HD really is 16:9, where as 16:9 SD isn’t actually 16:9…

Because the aspect ratios are slightly different, you can get black bars.

There was a thread on the cow a few days ago about this, and Vince posted this link, which explains the problem: https://www.mikeafford.com/blog/2009/03/pal-d1-dv-widescreen-square-pixel-settings-in-after-effects-cs4-vs-cs3/

[John-michael Seng-wheeler]

Easy question first:

[Neil Redman] “When you do it this way, do you have a good way to organise your footage on your harddisk? Or do you you just keep it in folders, like Card A, Card B, Card C, etc.?”

Basically yes. In my case the names of the folders for each card are reel numbers followed by a camera identifier.
I shoot with the Alexa so this is done for me by the camera. The files inside these folders are never touched after they come out of the camera. Any meddling might make for issues with conforming and relinking footage as projects are passed around.

Those folders are my reels. How they are sorted depends on the project and who the DIT is downloading the footage. On a simple scripted project it might be: Main Project Folder>Footage Sub Folder>Scene Sub Folder>Camera Sub Folder>Reel Folder>Video Files.

(Note the important fact that camera folder is the last thing before the reel. When you’re shooting multipal cameras keeping all the footage of a scene in one folder is necessary. If camera came before scene finding stuff would be much harder.)

We would never, ever, shoot more footage on a reel (card) after removing it from the camera.

However, if you must, it’s actually not all that hard to do with AVCHD on Windows.

Here’s the workflow I would use:

(I’ve worked this out from memory and a reference of the AVCHD file structure… I can’t find my little AVCHD camera at the moment to try with real footage. Before you try doing this with important footage, make sure you run a test, and set the erase protect switch on the card.
If anything goes wrong and the folder structure gets whacked, you can just delete everything and copy the card again from scratch.)

The first time around, create a Reel folder and copy the entire card. Inside your Reel folder you should have three folders: PRIVATE, DCIM and MISC.

The next time, you’ll need to do the copy in two steps.

First, open up both the Reel folder and the Card and navigate to the BDMV folder on each of them.

Copy and replace the INDEX.BDM and MOVIEOBJ.BDM with the newer ones from the card.

Then (this ONLY WORKS ON WINDOWS) go back to the reel folder and the top level of the card and copy the PRIVATE, DCIM and MISC into the reel folder again just as you did the first time. Windows will ask if you want to merge the contents of the folders. Say Yes, but first click the checkbox saying “apply to all further questions like this” or something like that. Then it will find a duplicate file and ask if you want to overwrite. Say No, again clicking the check box. This will copy only the files on the card that haven’t already been downloaded.

On Mac (at least on SL and before) It will ask you if you want to overwrite the folders, which is obviously not going to work. On Mac you will have to open each of the STREAM, CLIPINF and PLAYLIST folders and copy the files over. Just select all, copy them to the computer, and when it asks if you want to overwrite the existing files, click no.

One more point. If you’re using Premiere and only Premiere, it doesn’t need the whole structure of the card, just the BDMV folder, so you can forget step one, and you only need to copy the BDMV folder to your reel folder instead of the whole card. I don’t know how particular other programs are about having the rest of the folder structure.

I hope this all makes at least a little sense….

[John-michael Seng-wheeler]

It’s not imposible, but it will be varying degrees of difficult depending on what format you’re shooting on and whether you’re downloading your footage using a Mac or PC.

Answer those questions and I’ll try and give you a workflow.

[John-michael Seng-wheeler]

[Angelo Lorenzo] “They have presets for 720p, 1080i, and so forth, but Quicktime seems to override them with whatever you set in the main export panel; The only thing of importance is the codec’s bitrate.”

Not quite. You do need to set your settings correctly. One of them tells Premiere what to render, and the other tells Quicktime. If you set them up wrong, everything gets resized.

For example, if I go to codec options and set it to the DNxHD 1080i 220 10bit preset, but then forget to also set the resolution in the regular place, you’ll get a 1080i video of what ever that other size was, upscaled to 1080i.

I probably did a bad job of explaining that.

[John-michael Seng-wheeler]

I don’t think the 32bit limitation is going to slow down DNxHD encoding all that much. Remember, the only problem with 32bit is the amount of RAM it can access. So as long as it can do the encode efficiently with only 4GB of RAM (which, because the system is 64bit, it can have that 4GB all to itself, unlike a 32bit computer where it would be 4GB for the entire system) then you won’t see a speed reduction. Remember, Premiere is handeling the rendering in a 64bit process, then handing the completed frames to Quicktime to encode into DNxHD.

If you want to really test this, try exporting the same timeline to H.264 in a Quicktime and H.264 straight. (.mp4)

H.264 is a much more intense codec, and you can do a direct apples to apples comparison between the Quicktime engine and Adobe’s.

[John-michael Seng-wheeler]

[Tom Daigon] “I know that Quick Time is 32 bit.And using it can effectively slow down exports from CS6.

Is AVI 64 bit on Win 7? If so it should be faster export from CS6, no?”

The problem is that Quicktime files must be encoded in premiere using Quicktime the program, which is 32bit.

AVI files, on the other hand, are encoded by Premiere/AME directly.

The 32/64 bit question doesn’t affect the files themselves, just the programs encoding them.

That said, Vince is right… AVI is terribly old and doesn’t really support any useful modern codecs, so I don’t quite know why you’d use it anyway.

I master to DNxHD or Avid 1×1.

[John-michael Seng-wheeler]

[Anthony Webster] ” Is it true about the editing of AVCHD files in Premiere that you lose quality when performing different actions such as adding titles? “

No, that is not true. However, you do lose quality (albeit a very very small amount) by transcoding before editing.

Which route you take depends entirely on what kind of computer you have.