Here’s a ‘trap for young players’ as my old tech instructor would tell me, so I thought I would share it with you.
I had a shoot recently that involved two cameras and three separate data recording methods.
- Canon C 100 Mk 2 recording AVCHD format on internal SD card
- Canon 5D recording ‘mov’ files on SD card
- Blackmagic video assist for preview and also plugged into the HDMI output of the C 100, so it was dual recording from the C 100 on it’s own SD card in ProRes LT format.
The shoot was long (a series of 45 minute takes) and I ended up with over three hours of footage recorded across multiple SD cards from the 5D and the BM Video Assist and a single card from the C 100.
After copying the cards to a hard drive, I imported them into Premiere Pro. I checked the files in the bins and saw that there appeared to be three files missing in the C 100 SD card import. So I imported these ‘missing’ files manually and then laid them all into a sequence with the ‘mov’ files from the 5D. (The ProRes LT files were a duplicate of the C 100 files so I left these out of the sequence for the moment).
My plan was to use Plural Eyes to sync the C 100 files with the 5D files. (The C 100 was a mid shot of the host against chromakey and the 5D was a 3/4 closeup, also against chromakey).
As soon as I imported the files I noticed that the C 100 files were far longer than the 5D files on the timeline.
What had gone wrong?
My immediate thought was that the 5D camera had not recorded all of the shoot. Not good. I activated Plural Eyes on what was a four hour timeline, but the result was not encouraging.
It was at this point that I started to doubt my own ability.
- Had I actually recorded both cameras at the same time?
- Had some of the data become corrupted?
- And importantly, what would I say to my client?
Fortunately, after a good night’s sleep, I worked out what had happened and it turned out that the answer was that my camera was ‘smarter’ than me.
My error was that when I noticed that three C 100 files did not import, I manually imported them. Wrong! I ended up with three duplicate clips, so that when I laid them on my timeline against the 5D clips, of course they ran longer.
When the C 100 Mk II records long takes, it splits them over two (or more) ‘mts’ clips. But when you import the files into Premiere Pro, it looks like it only imports the first file, whereas it actually imports the whole clip, spanned over as many files as necessary, but only the first file appears in the Premiere Pro bin.
I knew this was how the Canon 5D worked, but in that case you do need to import all the files and place them manually on the timeline.
So, it all worked out. I deleted the additional files I had imported, synched each of the sequences one at a time and everything worked fine.
PS. I checked the Blackmagic Video Assist files which was initially even more confusing because it just records each video clip as one file, so no multiple clips for each file. This added to my confusion.
As I said, ‘traps for young players’.
Hi Martin, Good post! I have not had that experience with my C100 importing only the first MTS file. In fact it imports all the MTS files and I have to butt them up against eachother. I was noticing that at each join there would be a 2-3 frame loss in audio – very frustrating! I since then discovered the software that came with the C100 – Data Import Utility. Now instead of copying the SD card files over, I import it using this software which actually stitches any longer recordings of the C100’s MTS files together so that each “take” is one file – eliminating long recording problems.
Tim,
Maybe the Mk 11 model changed how this works? Thanks for the comment.