C100 -- Renaming AVCHD clips?

[Al Bergstein]

How are people handling the issue of renaming clips of AVCHD? Having worked with AVCHD on a Panny hmc150, I was really frustrated by dealing with an endless amount of clips with the same name (i.e. 00001.m
ts) Are you folks just stripping out the MTS files, or are you not worrying about it because you assume that the AVCHD file structure, renamed at the top level, will suffice?

While I am in love with the ergonomics of this camera, and have a 5Dmkiii, I'm really leery of getting involved in media management with AVCHD. There seems to be problems with it and Adobe Pr, for example.

thoughts?

[Monday Isa]

Keeping entire folders intact. Using Sony Vegas so yes from my jobs there are 3-4 0001 files but it's just something I deal with since using cams with solid state media.

[Erik Naso]

Originally Posted by Al Bergstein

How are people handling the issue of renaming clips of AVCHD? Having worked with AVCHD on a Panny hmc150, I was really frustrated by dealing with an endless amount of clips with the same name (i.e. 00001.m
ts) Are you folks just stripping out the MTS files, or are you not worrying about it because you assume that the AVCHD file structure, renamed at the top level, will suffice?

While I am in love with the ergonomics of this camera, and have a 5Dmkiii, I'm really leery of getting involved in media management with AVCHD. There seems to be problems with it and Adobe Pr, for example.

thoughts?

AVCHD is a pain with the naming conventions it has. I edit in Premiere Pro, and if I have several cards in a project I make sure I use a bin or folder for each card that is the same exact name as the folder I created for the card in my scratch disk as well as the archive of the card. If the media goes offline, and it does sometimes then it's easy to find and relink. Outside of that transcoding to another format will give you renaming options but a the cost of larger files.

[Darren Levine]

I leave the original files and folder structure as is, and have a folder for each day of shooting or for each card dump/initialize. all the renaming i do in premiere, and keep the same folder names for the bins. in premiere you can right click any file and view properties and it'll show you the location and original name.

[Cliff Stephenson]

Actually, if you use the included Canon Data Transfer Utility, it copies over the clips as individual .mts files that are uniquely named by year, month, date, hour, minute, second (which is better than the 00001.mts that the files get stuck with in their folders).

Here's my total workflow and it seems to work so far (I was REALLY concerned about clip naming because the FS700 is 00001.mts, etc and there didn't seem to be a way to get around that):

Import clips from SD card using the included Canon software (This will create single clips with unique files names such as 20130331150745.mts (Again, that's a clip recorded 3/31/2013 @ 3:07:45PM). The Canon transfer will also stich together longer files that are split up by the AVCHD format during recording.

From there, I can either keep the files as is because they all now at the very least contain unique date/time naming (as well as the original timecode) or if I want to rename them, I can with a few extra steps.

From that imported folder, I bring those "new" clips into Clipwrap and simply rewrap all so that they are now all in a .mov wrapper. This allows the clips to be rewrapped, but unlike everywhere else, they retain their original timecode (which is vital to match with the Samurai/Ninja I'm also recording to). The big key to the Clipwrap stage is that if you are cutting with Premiere Pro CS6 on a Mac (as I am) there's an additional bit of business that must be done to make the clips playback properly:
divergent media, inc. - Optimizing ClipWrap for Premiere Pro CS6
It's a line of code you enter into the terminal utility that will optimize your playback with CS6. But Clipwrap is the only program I've yet come across that retains the original timecode after you alter that original folder.

From there, for renaming, I bring the "rewrapped" .movs into either Adobe Bridge or an app I bought called "A Better Rename" and I can now do a batch rename on every clip from that folder. Generally when I shoot a big project, I like to name it something brief along with what day of the shoot it is and what shot of the day. When we were shooting Ghost Rider 2, I had a system set up (using the EX1R) so that all my clips were named along these lines: GR2_D15_089.xxx. That way, I could immediately tell you that shot was shot 89 on production day 15 of Ghost Rider 2. Now, with this system in place, I can do that with my Canon C100.

Oh happy day!!

I should also mention that the entire process to rewrap and rename an entire card of clips is under 10 minutes, so not a lot of extra legwork.

[Al Bergstein]

Useful tips all. Thx.