[Seth Blaustein]

Thanks for the specific direction Ernie and Tom. The FX factory plugins look great.

[Seth Blaustein]

Dan, et al,
Can you refer me to these downloadable transitions for FCP 6? I am looking for them but can’t seem to find any online. I’d like something like the Alpha transitions in FCP 7.

I’m using 6.0.6.

Thanks!

[Seth Blaustein]

Thanks for the advice, Guy. I plan on doing lots of massaging.

I’ll try to get back to this post in a few weeks to follow up on the resulting mixture.

[Seth Blaustein]

hmm, I see about the time-base. The canon’s produce 24 fps (24p). From what I can find on the internet, it looks like the AF-100 can shoot 24p as well…shouldn’t I be OK with the time-base if this is true?

I don’t edit the raw Canon H.264 in FCP–I convert to ProRes. If both the AF and Canon footage are the same time-base and both the same resulting codec (ProRes), shouldn’t I be ok?

I am trying to do a test of this before shooting (but I’m waiting to see if I can get my hands on the af-100 before shooting). So, in the meantime I am trying to gather as much info as possible.

I appreciate your help, Rafael.

Seth

[Seth Blaustein]

Forgive my ignorance, but what exactly is time-base in a video codec? How can I make sure I am not mixing?

How can I go about quantifying what the H.264 “flavor” is? I didn’t realize there were different varieties…

I will be using FCP on a macbook pro running on Tiger.

“…and what will you try to do with the footage..” —Are there types of edits I should avoid?

Thanks for the help.

Seth

[Seth Blaustein]

I downloaded the update, though I never did that convoluted hack. However, the aforementioned short film that I shot with the same t2i and this exact SD card has imported without a hitch into FCP, so I never had the need to.

42nd St called me around 9pm this evening. They want me to send the card back, and established that sometimes equipment just doesn’t work, and they can’t be held responsible if something they sell is faulty, although they do “stand by [their] product”, and will try to fix the issue. I’ll likely be sending it off to them in the morning.

[Seth Blaustein]

I hit an interesting snag…

In order to run the software to check if my SD card is a fraud, it appears that it will have to overwrite any data currently on the card–effectively reducing any hope of salvaging the footage on it. Obviously I won’t do this yet, however, there is a good chance that if I send this back to 42nd street in hopes that they can save my footage, they will scrap the card and I’ll never know for sure if this was a fraudulent SD card.

I may simply request that they send me the card back after testing but I don’t really trust them at this point.

[Seth Blaustein]

Thanks for pointing that article out. How low has 42nd st. Photo gone if they are selling counterfeit SD cards? I really hope that is not the case…

I tried using the free software on this Spain-based website on one such video file. It scanned the file and concluded that there was a 95% chance that the video is salvageable even though it also stated that files under 100 MB will probably have little chance of having any “interesting video.” Of course, in order to actually repair the files it will cost me about $100.

I’m going to allow 42nd street to attempt to retrieve any files–assuming this is what they will offer to do when they get back to me. My girlfriend has a PC, so i’ll attempt to use the software refrenced by Aero Quartet that can test for fraudulent SD cards late tonight. I can’t even express the fury I will feel for 42nd street photo if they actually sold me a phony SD card that has cost me a production.

One other note of interest. The short film that I shot in order to test this card contained about 14 GB of footage. If this were a typical counterfeit SD card as described on the Aero Quartet website it would usually only have 2 GB of real storage on a 32GB card. It still seems possible that my card is actually a 16GB (real storage) card that claims to be a 32GB. This may explain why my short film survived but not my footage that pushed the card to the 32GB capacity. Although, this makes me ask the question–why wouldn’t the footage UP TO 16GB on my recent shoot still have survived? This would make sense if the counterfeit card simply deleted all movie files after the 16GB limit is reached. I’ll post again after testing it with the counterfeit software…

I am keeping my hopes up that my footage will be recovered somehow.

[Seth Blaustein]

Morton,
Thanks for the advice. What do you mean when you say you “had a movie clip go bad”–did you have the same symptoms that I have?

[Seth Blaustein]

Total capacity of the card is currently 160.3 MB (not a promising number considering that after shooting the t2i cut me off with a message that the card was full). Capacity of the folder itself is 160 MB.

When using “Get Info” on each file in finder, they all appear to be 32KB.

When attempting to open into FCP I get the message “Wrong Type.” I don’t have VLC.

I want to see what 42nd St. says when they get in touch with me, and I’ll look into some of these data recovery options.

Do you think that I should be worried about my camera or the card reader or even Finder causing this disaster??