[John Rofrano]

[Jeff Kirkland] “the easiest way to do this in any application is to open the path in the Finder, then use the destination apps open dialog and drag the folder from the finder window into the app’s dialog window. unless the app is using some weird code, the app dialog will receive the path to the folder you just dragged in. “

Unfortunately , this doesn’t work (I tried it) because the app is, in fact, using very weird code. It appears that Catalyst was written by (or at least designed by) a team of Windows developers who tried really, really, really, hard to make it work just like a Windows application on a Mac. So it follows none of the Mac standards that you would expect. It drove me absolutely crazy and Sony insistent that they wanted the Windows version and Mac version to look and behave identical so I just gave up trying to convince them that they were doing the wrong thing for Mac users. That’s also why Catalyst has those big “Hello Kitty” icons and buttons. It’s for people using a Microsoft Surface Touch device. I also tried to explain that Apple didn’t make a Mac with a touch screen but once again they insisted that touch support was extremely important to them. Like I said, I gave up. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

You make a good suggestion though Jeff. You could open a Terminal window, drag the folder and drop it into that, and the fully qualified name will be pasted into the Terminal window. Then just cut and paste that into the File | Go to location… dialog.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com

[John Rofrano]

[Gerry Fraiberg] This is the path to a Camera Archive containing XAVC-L content:
Media Drive/FCPX_Cam Archives/Cairns-006_2016-06-17/Private/XDRoot/Clip

And the path to a Camera Archive with Nikon D700 content:
Media Drive/FCPX_Cam Archives/1407_RLK-Party/DCIM/105D7000

I see four (4) things immediately wrong with those paths. 😉

1. They should both start with a forward slash. i.e.,

   /Media Drive/

   not

   Media Drive/

2. There is a space in some of your folder names like ‘Media Drive’ and ‘FCPX_Cam Archives’ so you must either enclose them in quotes or escape the spaces with a backslash. That means use

   "/Media Drive" & "/FCPX_Cam Archives"

   or

   /Media\ Drive & /FCPX_Cam\ Archives

3. Your post uses ‘FCPX_Cam Archives’ but your screen shot has an underscore in front of that folder (_FCPX_Cam Archives)
4. Finally, Camera Archives have a hidden extension .fcarch that needs to be included in the path in order for it to work.

Making those four corrections, try these paths instead:

/Media\ Drive/_FCPX_Cam\ Archives/Cairns-006_2016-06-17.fcarch/Private/XDRoot/Clip
/Media\ Drive/_FCPX_Cam\ Archives/1407_RLK-Party.fcarch/DCIM/105D7000

– or –

"/Media Drive/_FCPX_Cam Archives/Cairns-006_2016-06-17.fcarch/Private/XDRoot/Clip"
"/Media Drive/_FCPX_Cam Archives/1407_RLK-Party.fcarch/DCIM/105D7000"

Don’t forget to include the quotes (“”) if you use the second set of paths. Either of those should work.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com

[John Rofrano]

It looks like normal DV footage to me (as others have pointed out). You have to realize that NTSC DV only has 480 lines of vertical resolution. If you take a straight line and tilt it, you will see stair steps because there simply isn’t enough resolution to produce a smooth diagonal line. To put it another way, a single DV frame is only 314K pixels. That one third of a mega pixel or 0.3 megapixels. I’m pretty sure that the backup camera on a Prius has more resolution! 😉 (…and I just checked and the back-up camera on a Prius has 520 lines of vertical resolution compared to NTSC DV’s 480! Yikes! )

Are you really “digitizing” these tapes or are you just “capturing” them? I ask because DV tapes are already digital and should be captured via Firewire connection which simply copies the data bit-for-bit from the tape to a file on your hard drive with zero loss. This would give you exactly what the camera recorded. If you are truly digitizing them by playing them back through a digital-to-analog converter only to put the them back through an analog-to-digital converter, you would not be getting the best quality. So if you are using Firewire, you are capturing them, not digitizing them and if you are not using Firewire, you should be for your client’s sake.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com

[John Rofrano]

Can you paste your path here into a post? Just so I can see if anything looks strange in it?

This works for me and unless there is something really special about XAVC-L clips, it should work for you.

You could also make a regular folder on your hard drive and copy and paste the video into that older from the Camera Archive. This would be exactly like if you had copied the files from the original camera card into a folder. Does that workflow normally work for you? (sorry I know nothing about XAVC-L camera cards)

If you can explain your normal workflow for these clips, I can explain how to do it with the Camera Archive.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com

[John Rofrano]

[Gerry Fraiberg] “Sony Catalyst Browse to convert XAVC-L clips to MP4 to save space, but it doesn’t see the Camera Archives which are proprietary to FCPX. Suggestions? Thoughts?”

Camera Archives are not proprietary to FCPX. They are Mac OS X Package folders and really are just like any other folder except that they are treated like files under certain circumstances. It’s unfortunate that the Sony developers are not smart enough to realize this but now that you do it’s easy to get around. 😉

All you need to do is tell Catalyst Browse the complete path to the folder inside the Camera Archive that contains the video files and it will happily open it and process your videos. First you need to know the full path. To get this path you need to go to the Finder and right-click on the Camera Archive and select Show Package Contents, then when the files get refreshed, you will see the root of the camera card. You may have to right-click on it and select Show Package Contents again and again to eventually get into the folder that holds the video. Keep doing this until you are at the folder just above where the video files are. Then you want to right-click and select Copy to copy this folder name.

Once you have the fully qualified folder name to the video files, then you would open Catalyst Browse and use the menu item File | Go to location… and paste that path into it and click OK and Catalyst Browse will open the folder and display the video files within.

Let me give you an example using an AVCHD Camera Archive that I have called 20150523-LimeRock-TransAm that’s in my Movies folder. Since it’s in my Movies folder the full path is “/Users/rofrano/Movies/20150523-LimeRock-TransAm”. The hidden extension is “.fcarch” and the path to the AVCHD files inside of it is “/AVCHD/BDMV/STREAM”. That makes the full path that I would paste into Catalyst Browse:

/Users/rofrano/Movies/20150523-LimeRock-TransAm.fcarch/AVCHD/BDMV/STREAM

Your path will be something similar. If I paste that path into Catalyst Browse, it will open the STREAM folder and show me my video files. You just have to find the correct folder for your XAVC-L camera card.

The important point in all of this is that Camera Archives are not proprietary to FCP X. They are just Mac Package folders which you can get into quite easily and as you may have noticed, they mirror the folder structure of your camera card exactly. Not a disadvantage but an advantage because it retains the camera card format.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com

[John Rofrano]

[Amanda Duffield] “So, it negates the need to do individual renders from one long piece of footage? I do this all the time because I might have 5 episodes on one long piece of footage and at the moment I’m rendering one by one.”

VASST Render Assistant will render either the entire project to multiple formats, or the current Timeline Selection, or Regions, or between Markers. If you select Regions or Markers it uses the Region or Marker name as the filename. It only cost $9.95 USD.

In the interest of full disclosure I’m the author of Render Assistant. 😉

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com

[John Rofrano]

[Suhaib Siddiqi] “Any way I tried your suggestion, and changed the display to 100%. Still same problem.”

Hmmm… that should have fixed it. I can’t imagine what it could be then (sorry).

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com

[John Rofrano]

It looks like you set the DPI of your Windows Display to be something other than 100%. Change it back and your problem should go away.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com

[John Rofrano]

[leonardo barone] “…so why I can’t get a good chroma simple enlighting my wall with two softboxs ?”

Because if there are people in the shot, the whites of their eyes will get keyed out a will there white socks or shirt or pants. The reason chroma key uses such a bright green is because that usually won’t appear in the foreground that you want to keep. Green is also selected because most video is compressed to 4:2:2, 4:2:1, or 4:2:0 with 4: being the luma and the green channel so there is twice as much information for green in the video signal as there are for red or blue. This is why green makes a better key.

Feel free to use white if you want to but at that point I would use a Luma keyer rather than a Chroma keyer. You can also use the Mask Generator to pull a key with a white background by making an Alpha Mask from the footage.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com

[John Rofrano]

[Michael Gissing] “+1 for Boris”

+1

Boris just asked me to create some new training for BCC10 in FCP X which was just announced. Look for it soon. 😉

If there is anything in Boris Continuum Complete that you’d like to see training for in FCP X just let me know and I’ll ask Boris if I can produce it. I also create the BCC training for Vegas Pro for them. I’ve been using Boris FX for a long time and really like the power of these plug-ins. The new BCC Grunge is one of my personal favorites.

Here are two Boris TV episodes that I did for Vegas Pro using BCC Grunge (this is a Vegas Pro Thread after all) 😉

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vWmWRokLmc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkrXCiuYQSI

I hope to produce something similar for FCP X.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com

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