[Omar Ayoub]

Thank you very much for sharing these wonderful resources, Ryan. I’ll be sure to check them out. It sucks that Google Reader is going to discontinued, but news is getting around that Digg is working on a similar service, and Feedly seems to be the number one replacement at the moment. Anyway.. Thanks again for all the help 🙂

[Omar Ayoub]

Thank you for all the help Ryan, I really appreciate it.
On another note, is there anyway I can educate myself on these things (theoretically speaking)? If you can point me towards some comprehensive resources (as far as the technicalities of cameras/editing/post-production/.. are concerned), it would be great.

[Omar Ayoub]

Ryan, my external hard disk contains two “CONTENTS” folders (each was directly copied from one of the Canon CF cards). In it, there’s another folder, “CLIPS001”, which contains the following files:

AA0315.CIF
AA0315.XML
AA0315.XMP

then the .MXF videos themselves, with corresponding .SIF files:

AA031501.MXF
AA031501.SIF

AA031502.MXF
AA031502.SIF

.
.
.

According to an Adobe source on the subject: the files with the similar names which are numbered, are all part of a single video clip, but are automatically separated by the camera when it switches recording from the internal memory to SD cards when the former is full. This is known as Relay Recording, and it creates these spanned clips which the Adobe Media Browser in PP should interpret as a single asset.. Unfortunately, it displayed a “generic error” message (as I’ve mentioned before).

I have the exact files that were in the Canon root folders and when I dragged them to Adobe Media Encoder, it gave an error message which read: “___ could not be imported. Could not read from the source. Please check the settings and try again.”

What I ended up doing was adding the .MXFs to a queue in Handbrake then converting them to .M4Vs under the following specs:

• Video: H.264 codec, Framerate same as source, Constant Quality: RF: 17.5, Video filters: none
• Audio: AAC (faac) codec, Bitrate: 160

This produced a relatively good quality conversion of each clip, although the size is way smaller (almost 2GB for the original .MXF as opposed to the 450MB for the new .M4V). I wish I can find a solution for the original .MXFs…

[Omar Ayoub]

Thank you for your replies.
@Ryan: The problem is, I borrowed two CF cards from a friend of mine and when he wanted to re-use them, he copied the entire root folder of each card onto an external hard disk. So now I have both “Contents” folders from cards A and B on my HDD. I tried importing them via the Premiere Pro media folder but it gives the “generic error” message. Any workaround?