Patrick Murphy
Forum Replies Created
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If you are on a Mac Shotput will give you some of the features of ClipBrowser, but if you are on a Windows platform I’m not aware of anything out there. I’ve had an AF100 for about a year, and while there is much to love about this little camera, clip management is not in that category.
Panasonic’s utility, AVCCAM viewer is, well, pathetic in comparison with Clip Browser. It’s clumsy, complicated, and in my experience capable of very little.
The best I think you can hope for here is an NLE that will let you pick and choose clips to import into your project.
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“If you were to look around, what other company would you trust?”
Well, I’ve looked into it somewhat, and so far I’ve not found evidence that any other manufacturer is particularly admirable in this area. Responsible manufacturing is more expensive, and at this time, there doesn’t seem to be any competitive advantage to environmentally responsible behavior.
Which might seem to let Apple, and it’s consumers off the hook. Except that Apple claims to be responsible when there’s ample evidence this is mostly malarkey. Additionally, Apple’s future trajectory in terms of system design and corporate commitment raises even more questions.
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“Again, this is straight from the horses mouth, but do you think Apple lies about all of this?: https://www.apple.com/environment/”
Well, I wouldn’t put it past them. But I’ll admit that Apple’s web presentation is very slick and reassuring.
However check this NYT article from Sept. 2011,
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/02/technology/apple-suppliers-causing-environmental-problems-chinese-group-says.html/I saw a presentation in the US by one of the named sources in that article, Mr. May Jun of the Chinese Institute for Public and Environmental Affairs, several months prior to this article. It was mostly about general environmental conditions in China and as you might expect it was pretty grim. What surprised me was that at the end of the presentation he devoted about 10 minutes to Apple in particular. He said that while US corporations tended to be fairly responsible in dealing with suppliers, Apple was uniquely uncooperative and unresponsive to Chinese groups who were trying to address environmental issues.
The Institute published a special report on Apple which is available here: https://www.ipe.org.cn/En/about/report.aspx?s_text=Apple It’s much more detailed and on point than the Times article.
So just in this one area, it’s fairly clear that trusting Apple is a fairly dicey proposition.
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“The problem regarding Apple products is not based on chemical content but simply that there’s no easy way to dissemble. As miniaturization continues across the board recycling will have to advance in its disassembly to rescue and recycle the content.”
As one of the world’s most innovative electronics companies, and a company making record profits, one might expect that Apple can rightfully claim to be an industry leader in many areas. Yet their record, in employee treatment, environmental issues, both manufacturing and recovery, and insourcing to badly needed American tech manufacturing is generally poor. Regrettably they seem to have adopted a posture that is pretty much parallel to late 19th century industrial titans, who only addressed worker and social problems by reacting to government or outside pressure.
If it ever really existed, Apple’s commitment to being socially responsible has evaporated as they have morphed into a consumer electronic and media producer. As a leader, and a example of corporate excellence, what Apple does reverberates widely to other companies, and Apple’s behavior sets a standard which is unacceptably low. Given their stock price and profit margin, it’s tragic that this should be so.
The technological challenges you mention are real, but this is not a question of technological complexity, it’s a question of will, and corporate culture.
As a corporation, Apple is remarkably insular in relation to it’s customers and it’s community, remarkably devoted to legal conflict with competitors, and apparently unconcerned with the social implications of it’s corporate policies.
One may argue that these are legitimate preoccupations of a modern profit driven corporation. I’m not sure I could reasonably dispute this proposition. Yet at the same time, as a citizen of a nation facing real challenges in all these areas I would submit that Apple’s responses are utterly inadequate and unacceptable. If social responsibility is beyond the reasonable expectations for Apple, then the rational person is justified in looking elsewhere.
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Why don’t they just send Franz another email?
Honestly, isn’t this getting a little sad, or perhaps comical? I can’t decide which organization Apple resembles more, the Vatican, or the Kremlin. The amount of interpretation, parsing of statements, and speculation devoted to their intentions is remarkable. No video? Just what will be said at this meeting that is so freaking sensitive or potentially threatening to Apple Inc?
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Transfer of clips, renaming, archiving, and other basic media management functions seems to be a major PITA with AVCHD footage. My experience with Panasonic’s AVCCAM utility is that it doesn’t preserve timecode, nor allow selection of individual clips, and has a hopelessly clunky interface. Compare this with Sony’s HDCAM EX ClipBrowser 2.6 which allows all of the above and is fairly easy to use.
Shotput Pro is a nice start, but not if you are editing in a Windows environment. I’m really surprised that no third party or, god forbid, Panasonic themselves, have not addressed these basic professional issues with media management. And of course that’s only for routine file transfer and logging. As far as I know there are no programs that allow for sophisticated storage and data based archiving of media in this area.
For PC users the only solution that seems to be functional at this point is to transcode them using Cineform which essentially triples the storage requirements of the media. Since my editing software easily handles the footage in it’s native format this seems to be an rather clumsy and costly workaround that could be resolved with a better application.
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After some testing of my strategy the results have been rather discouraging. The .mov files played well on my Mac platform, but the transfer to a Windows 7 environment revealed some serious problems.
Premiere 5.5 reported some errors on importing the .mov files, and playback was flawed by stuttering and lack of thumbnails on several clips. In short these were definitely not edit ready files.
I sent a message to Clipwrap support requesting advice or assistance. The reply was prompt and very to the point:
“Unfortunately we don’t have a fix for this – Quicktime for Windows has long been neglected, so even on a fast PC the performance is terrible. I also believe that when bringing AVCHD in via a wrapper other than MTS, you lose out on some specific optimizations Adobe has built in to Premiere for windows to improve h264 decoding.”
They also offered a refund, which I thought was a very stand-up gesture on the part of the outfit.
So I’m looking at Cineform at this point as well . What should I expect in terms of size increase on the clips?
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After testing my strategy on selected clips I’m fairly discouraged. The re-wrapped clips seem to function pretty well on the Mac side, but after transferring them into the Windows environment things did not work nearly as well as I’d hoped.
Premiere 5.5 reported some errors on importing the .mov files, and playback was flawed by stuttering and lack of thumbnails on several clips. In short these were definitely not edit ready files.
I sent a message to Clipwrap support requesting advice or assistance. The reply was prompt and very to the point:
“Unfortunately we don’t have a fix for this – Quicktime for Windows has long been neglected, so even on a fast PC the performance is terrible. I also believe that when bringing AVCHD in via a wrapper other than MTS, you lose out on some specific optimizations Adobe has built in to Premiere for windows to improve h264 decoding.”
They also offered a refund, which I thought was a very stand-up gesture on the part of the outfit.
So, Noah, it looks like your approach is my best option at this point. Could you elaborate a little on what you mean by “organize at the reel level”? Also what’s your opinion about using something like Cineform Neoscene to transcode the media to a more portable format? A fair share of my media files will be delivered to clients for further editing.
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Thanks John,
This looks exactly like what I was hoping to find. A simple utility that allows for off-loading and filename manipulation without compromising the rather complicated file dependancies of AVCHD and similar media. On both Mac and PC. Even better.
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Thanks for your reply.
Yes, that’s what I’m doing. Is there any way to configure the camera to avoid this overly simple approach to file naming?