I'm just starting a new project and I just got all the footage sent to me. It's all from a Canon 5d. There are many clips on each card and even interviews are broken up in clip segments. I was thinking of joining the interviews at least and rendering them as individual files. Just wondering what approaches people use and the benefits and pitfalls there might be. Any and all suggestions and comments are welcome.
Thanks.
Vegas Pro 18 (latest build)
@ddm In my “Source” folder on disc I would create sub folders for the different types of events. I would then rename all clips within each subfolder to represent the type of event, with a leading 001 002 etc or 01 to 02.
If they are of type mjpeg .mov you will run into a ~ 40 clip limit on the timeline, hopefully they are .mp4. Probably not applicable to the 5D, more the 5D mk iv.
I personally wouldn’t render the clips out to make a single bigger one because that loses some quality, unless you are going to use a very high quality intermediate like Prores HQ. Using concatenation is an option, but not sure if the “join” is good enough for vp. Ffmpeg can be used to do this.
The Canon software DPP, Digital Photo Professional can be used to join and import the files if the camera is connected up. That might be possible also when importing the cards contents, without the camera, worth a try.
Great. Good ideas. I'm used to an interview being uninterrupted but I guess there was a time limit with the Canon that automatically created a new clip after a certain period of time, so all the interviews were in multiple segments.
Thanks so much.
It's very unlikely that I would make one big file from a bunch of small ones except to circumvent the "~ 40 clip limit" scenario that @JN- described. I add descriptive comments to the end of the file names allowing the original file name to maintain time sequence.
From the standpoint of I/O performance, my shade tree theory is that it's easier for the system to swap from one small file to another than to displace into a very large file. I suspect that's particularly true for the vanishing "seek" times of modern day SSD and NVMe disks.
Disclaimer:
I've not done recent scientific measurements of this, but, forty years ago I think I remember sitting in a classroom for weeks studying how a byte of data is transferred over an I/O channel.
“I guess there was a time limit with the Canon that automatically created a new clip after a certain period of time”
It’s possible that the clips are all just under the 4gb limit for the CF card being formatted in fat32?
For example, with the 5D mk. iv the cards in-camera formatting was always limited to fat32 unless it was above a certain card size. From memory I think it had to be a 256gb CF card to get exFat formatting.
@ddm You need to be careful joining the clips that are broken into 4gb segments. Use your Canon's software to download them and it should join them into one big file without any audio gaps. Or you could use Vegas's Device Explorer but I suspect this will only join them correctly when downloading from your card. It may not work on files already copied to your pc. There are several threads on this forum about the problem of 4gb segments.
Thanks for all the suggestions. Very helpful in getting my mind around ways of looking at this.