An alternative is to capture the camera feed directly to HD on a laptop. Use the Vegas capture utility, Scenalyzer Live, or, if you can afford it, Adobe's OnLocation, which offers a lot of other invaluable tools for production to you. I've been able to, using ScLive, to capture 2 cameras simultaneously onto the same laptop.

Is this possible with a AVCHD camera?
What would it send down its firewire port?

I did have another thought. This problem could in part be due to the speed of the card. I've seen Vegas loose a few frames joining mpeg-2 files from a DVD camcorder and with files from a DVD but from the description this is more than just a couple of frames.

My only reference is the SxS cards for the EX1. They are speced way faster than what the basic writing of video would indicate and the subtle reason why they need the extra speed is to cope with this kind of scenario, when files are being split things have to happen fast.

Bob.

I use a 16 GB SDHC card category 6 which is the fastest.
I "capture" with a cardreader and have not tried firewire yet.
Due to the FAT 32 2GB file limit the cam must make a new file every 2GB and presume every new file misses the first second so it is on the card and cannot be repaired by capture technics or in any other way.
Thus means that SD cams are limited to 15 min scenes without gaps even if you feed them with 32GB cards as long as they can´t write in NTFS format.
What I don´t understand is why flash memorycams don´t use compact flash cards they must be easier to develop and are just a
little bigger in volume.
/Aje

I must have missed the AVCHD part, not being familiar with that specific camera. Adobe's OnLocation captures HD, and that if it's writing to a Fat32 drive will break up the capture into individual files without dropping as much as a frame.

That seems odd because FAT32 can handle 4gig files. FAT16 was limited to 2gigs. I think something else is in play here.

Dave T2

The same "problem" exists with some other camcorders that store the video on flash memory and/or hard drives.

I have a Sony HDR-SR7, it has a 60GB hard drive. The same thing occurs as with your Canon. With any recording over 15-17 minutes the camcorder splits it into files of less than 2GB.

The solution, which is not documented very well, is to use the included Sony "Picture Motion Browser" software to import the video files to the computer. The software will correctly "stitch" the files together so that there will be one continuous event when placing the file on the Vegas time line.

I briefly looked at the Canon Pixela software documentation and it doesn't mention this problem/solution either. I would suggest that you try using the Canon software to transfer the video files instead of copying them with the Windows Explorer.

NOTE: The Sony "Picture Motion Browser" is incompatible with the 64 bit version of Windows Vista. I had to re-install Vista twice because the Sony software installed a device driver that would cause the OS to not boot! I don't know if Sony has fixed this or if there is a work-around. So if you have Vista 64, try the Canon software on Vista 32 or XP 32 first.

Nedski

Old news. Here's a sticky from www.dvinfo.net:

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/avchd-format-discussion/113083-canon-vixia-hg10-2gb-file-limit-headache.html

There are workarounds, but all have limitations. You'd think by now, the camcorder manufacturers would have figured out that 2GB is not a big enough file.

"You'd think by now, the camcorder manufacturers would have figured out that 2GB is not a big enough file. "

I've had that discussion with several HDD recorder manufacturers.
Their response is that Macs cannot read NTFS. I point out that OSX has been able to mount and read NTFS volumes for a long time. Any older Mac that can't probably can't cope with mpeg-2 let alone AVCHD so the logic is flawed. But still they persist.

There might be more to it than that. I think FAT32 takes up less space on the drive than NTFS and / or is lighter on the CPU. The other issue could be licencing of the NTFS file system.

Bob.

I think that you covered the main points as to why the camcorders use FAT32. But even so, this problem is only going to get worse. Aren't the Canon HF11/ HG20/HG21 files at the highest bit rate (24 Mbps), even larger per elapsed time? 2 GB will get you only about 11 minutes of recording time per file.

Reading through the posts at DVInfo it seems that the camera is recording the clips just fine as they can playback in the camera OK and when you stitch them together using a binary append all is well.

So the only real issue is getting an NLE like Vegas to play nicely with the clips. I *think* I can see why it's such a chore. The video and audio isn't a contiguous stream of binary data. So the audio for the last frame of a file might partially be in the next file or even part of the data to build the last frame or whatever. Vegas would have no way of knowing this.
Simply stitching the files together seems to work but I wonder if the data in the header is then correct.
You'd think the camera manufacturer would have an obligation to provide the software to perform this simple task. Then again with the XDCAM EX footage Vegas now seems to be about the only NLE that can't stitch split clips, we still have to use the clip browser for this and the latest version is woefully SLOW.
On a side note my Edirol R-4 audio recorder also uses FAT32 however Vegas can stitch the files without loosing a sample.

Bob.

Bob, I've suspected that the FAT32 limitation we keep hitting is because of Macs.

What a ridiculous approach - why not produce drives/cards using the latest technology, and if it's deemed necessary to appease and accommodate the "slowcoaches", include an option for them to format in whatever way they need, poor things.

Making us all suffer because of someone else's limitation is a very strange philosophy.

(I know I'm preaching to the choir, but I feel better now!)