[Peter Jay gould]

Hi Michael (and Pat),

The workflow they’ve been using involves 20 student Avid workstations each using local storage (they’re trying to replace all this with networked storage which would change everything, but not on today’s budgets). Students export packages to be rolled in to studio-based programs, and these are imported into another Avid in the studio which is rigged for live playback (kludgey but it works for them and they’ve done it for many years). So they’re not needing to import the actual project and media in the studio, just export a project to a file that will do a fast import at the other end. I’m told they tried and tried to do this and it was never successful, and since I haven’t had to do it since the Meridien hardware days (I’ve been editing Avid off and on since 1993 but I’ve had a long break) and my time in their facility is limited I’m trying to get the jump on things.

So: does exporting same-as-source set the right flags to ensure a fast import? That’s apparently what they tried without success. I will give it a shot myself and see how it goes. It’s tough being out of the loop for awhile.

Pete

[Peter Jay gould]

Hi Rob,

An auto mixer is much more sophisticated than a noise gate in three important respects:

1) If no one is talking a noise gate would shut off all tracks, cutting out room tone. An auto mixer is smart enough to leave one channel on so there is continuous room tone and you don’t hear the ambience cut in and out. Most common is “last mic on,” i.e. the most recent active mic remains active until another one triggers.

2) If someone talks loudly enough to overcome the gate threshold on the mic worn by the person sitting next to them, intelligence in the auto mixer can differentiate between the higher quality sound reaching the speaker’s mic and the more attenuated sound reaching the neighbor’s mic, and keep the neighbor’s mic muted while activating the speaker’s. This is especially critical when someone with a naturally loud voice sits next to someone with a naturally much quieter voice, where normally they would constantly trip the gate on the neighbor’s channel as well as their own.

3) If multiple people speak at once a good auto mixer will reduce the overall gain by a fixed amount depending on how many channels are open so the final output level does not clip. This is different from a compressor/limiter since it is not a continuous processing of audio throughout, but is based on reducing gain by a specific number of additional db for each additional channel open. Some auto mixers also allow one or more channels to be selected as a priority so in a free for all they will have more gain than the others so their audio remains intelligible in preference to the other multiple speaking voices.

So: an auto mixer plugin would reference multiple tracks simultaneously, since its intelligence depends on the interactivity between those tracks, while a noise gate operates independently on each channel without regard to what is going on in the other channels. Hopefully that makes sense.

Pete

[Peter Jay gould]

Hi Steve,

It’s still a mystery, but I got it to work. Whatever I was doing wrong before, AE simply would not offer motion tracking as a choice when I had the precomp selected.

Once it worked it worked perfectly.

Thanks everyone for the help. Wish I knew what ultimately made the difference but getting it to work was worth a million bucks!

Pete

[Peter Jay gould]

I can’t seem to find a way to do that; the tracking function only appears when you have directly opened a source layer. Unless I’m missing something.

Pete

[Peter Jay gould]

Sadly no; it’s a zit midway between lower lip and chin, so fairly constant motion during speech and independent of all other facial features.

Pete

[Peter Jay gould]

Hi Uli,

Thanks for the additional thoughts – in particular that file-based media tends to use the ancient FAT32 file system with its inherent 2GB limit (can you tell I’m a very recent convert from tape?). I was ALMOST all the way there: the full file structure was being copied off the card, only the media browser was being used to access files, and nothing was being brought directly in from Windows Explorer. I already knew that if I did otherwise, all the associated metadata (including timecode) would disappear.

The ONE THING that fooled me was the discontinuous numbering of the files. I expected to see 00000, 00001, 00002, 00003, etc. within the media browser, just as I had seen them in every previous shoot with this camera. As soon as it SKIPPED a filename that was clearly present on the physical media, it looked as though I had a problem.

Compounding it was the fact that when I ran Panasonic’s own repairer program on that file structure, instead of reporting that everything was dandy and leaving it alone, it reported that it had found a repairable error and “fixed” the files by disassociating them from each other and hacking off a few frames in between.

Hopefully this thread will help someone else avoid the same problem, and a potential disaster because if they run the repairer program on the card itself without also having a complete backup of the file structure, the changes are likely to be irreversible. Fortunately I only ran it on a clone of the file structure and I was able to get everything back once I figured it out.

Pete

[Peter Jay gould]

Thanks Rick. I hadn’t realized the AF100 is INTENDED to split a long clip among multiple .mts files, I guess because all our prior interviews are (just a little bit) shorter than this one and therefore I never ran into it.

So NOW I understand what happened, and there is definitely a “gotcha” here, so let me explain it completely for the benefit of anyone else who runs into this.

The AF100 will INTENTIONALLY split a long file into multiple .mts files. Let’s say you shoot a 30 minute clip. The first 24 (or whatever it is) minutes will be in 00000.mts. The last six (or whatever) minutes will be in 00001.mts. Then if you have some other clips they will be in 00002.mts, 00003.mts etc. When you open up Premiere and look at those files, you will see 00000.mts and then it will jump to 00002.mts. Premiere will not show you 00001.mts in the media browser and you will think it’s missing. IT’S NOT. The original clip called 00000.mts, when played from within Premiere, will contain both its contents AND that of 00001.mts as a single, continuous clip.

Now if you panic as I did and run Panasonic’s AVCCAM Restorer program, it will “recover” 00001.mts and make it a separate clip. However, in so doing, 00000.mts will now only contain its original 24 minutes, AND, there will be a gap of a few frames between the two (if you butt them up against each other in an edit there will be a visible and audible skip).

Fortunately I only ran AVCCAM Restorer on the hard drive I copied the data out to; I didn’t run it on the card containing the original files. Once I read Rick’s message, I copied the files again from the card to the hard drive. This time I did NOT run AVCCAM Restorer and I again opened the files in Premiere’s media browser. Once again it jumps from 00000.mts to 00002.mts. But when I play 00000.mts within Premiere, it does in fact contain the full length clip, combining the contents of 00000.mts and 00001.mts without a hiccup. THAT’S why the media browser skips 00001.mts. It’s not intended to be a separate clip.

Wish I’d known about this particular issue – it would have saved a lot of angst. Glad I know it now! (Is this an RTFM thing? Did I miss it somewhere?)

Pete

[Peter Jay gould]

Okay – I fixed it. But it’s creepy.

I forgot all about the “AVCCAM Restorer” that’s included with the unit (since we’ve never needed it before).

But now that we’ve restored the file (which was successful), I see what REALLY happened. This was an interview that went for about 28 minutes. What it did was to spontaneously BREAK THE INTERVIEW INTO TWO FILES, 00000 and 00001 with 00001 being corrupt in some way (and only being about two minutes long). Unfortunately the files aren’t fully contiguous – it lost about 15 frames in between while the interview subject was speaking.

While what was being said wasn’t absolutely critical, it’s a little scary to think the camera could do that and we won’t know.

This was footage I shot myself, so I know for certain the Big Red Button wasn’t touched. It did this all by itself.

Wonder what THAT’S about and what the cause might be. We’re doing documentary-style corporate production, heavy on talking-head interviews, and that could be fatal if it happened at the wrong moment.

Pete

[Peter Jay gould]

Oh – one other thing. If I open the folder in Windows and navigate to PRIVATE/AVCHD/BDMV/STREAM and open 00001.mts in Windows Media Player, it plays just fine. So the stream file doesn’t seem to be corrupted.

Pete

[Peter Jay gould]

Hi Jan,

It’s true – I know there are several high-end monitors that do. But for about $250 you can get a 7″ HDMI monitor that’s great as a framing reference but obviously won’t be a good focusing guide. For users who have to “do more with less” I think you’ll find they’re headed there rather than in the over-$1K direction.

So – the next time you’re talking to the engineers – it’d be terrific if you could ask. I know it’s not in the firmware NOW, but if there was a way to do it I’m betting it’d be VERY popular. If not – it’s still an unbelieveable camera for that price range.

Pete