File Conversion problem.PLEASE HELP!!!

[Antonie Koen]

Hi there.

I did a 2 camera shoot yesterday for a modelling school. the cameras involved were the sony v1 and ex1.

My problem is with the EX1's footage. The guy operating the ex1 was shooting in sp (1440x1080) dumping the sxs card data to a laptop with a external hard drive during the shoot to make space on the sxs to be used again. He only had 1 x 8gig and 1x 16 gig for a 3 hr shoot .

I have installed the Sony clip browser to view the ex1 footage and also for conversion to mxf files. I use sony vegas 8b and I need it to be in mxf format for editing. There are 6 clips in total, 4 of them I could convert to mxf, no problem. But there are 2 big clips which gives me an error when I try to convert.

ERROR READING:

"CONVERSION ERROR OCCURED" - then I press OK and the following appears:
"CONDITION FAILURE - ASSERTION FAILURE"

My laptop and my new external hard drive is formatted in the FAT32 format. Could this be causing my problems and would a reformat of the external drive to NTFS be possible. The hard drive is a Western Digital Passport 160 gig. I urgently need to get this job out and due to this problem my editing has come to a complete halt.

Any help will be GREATLY appreciated.

Many thanks

Antonie Koen

[Piotr Wozniacki]

This error is displayed when a clip spans two cards. IF you suspect such a clip exists on your cards, always copy the whole SxS structure to your HDD first, then export from the copy (of course, I am talking here about the COPY and EXPORT functions of the Clip Browser, not the OS commands).

See detailed discussion here:

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=116133

[Michael Canion]

Could this be a single recording spanning two cards or a single recording larger than 4gb being split into multiple files thingy?

Are the two clips in sequential order? Did they span two cards? XDCAM EX devices automatically save video that exceeds 4 GB in size as multiple clips. If you collect these clips into one media or folder, they will be automatically grouped so that you can handle them as a single clip.

Did you put both the BPAV files in the same folder before export?

If it's not something common like that, then I suspect something more sinister.... (cue scary music...)

Let us all know and we can go from there.

Good luck,
Mike

[Antonie Koen]

I took my external hdd from the laptop and connected it to my editing pc and also installed the clip browser on this machine. I used the clip browsing software to export to mxf and the mxf file was placed on my editing pc. Everything works great now.

I don't really know for sure why it worked this time but I am glad it did. Maybe it is because I tried to export to mxf on a FAT32 ext hdd hard drive.

Thanks for your help and input guys, much appreciated.

[Bob Pascucci]

Piotr, I think you've touched upon an "issue" I've also been dealing with, trying to figure if I was just doing something stupid.

Many of my clips span 2 cards (I do a lot of theatre video, and not many shows (or acts, for that matter) fit on one card, even if it's 16GB. If I dump them to the computer (Mac) using the clip browser software, it automatically recognizes these split clips and knits them together like magic. If I try to import directly from the card using the XDCAM transfer program, however, it does not seem to be able to join the segments and I wind up with fragments instead.

The workaround I've been using is to move stuff from card to computer with clip browser, and then to move those clips (already on the hard drive) into FCP using the XDCAM transfer software. This works, but it's an extra (long) step. Am I missing something here?

Bob P

[Piotr Wozniacki]

Originally Posted by Bob Pascucci

Am I missing something here?

Bob P

No, Bob - this is the only way to handle clips, split either by card spanning, or due to the 4GB file size limitation of the FAT32 system. Of course only required if you need seamless stitching the chunks back into original takes; you can do it manually with mxf's in your NLE -but with the long GOP format, you'll probably miss a couple of frames.

So if the split took place at a very important moment in your recording, always let the Clip Browser do its job before exporting to mxf's! Yes, it IS an extra step - but what I do is copy and keep the original BPAV structure on my field laptop as the first backup, and export the ready mxf's from it to my external eSATA HDD as the second copy, ready for editing on my main desktop system. Considering I end up with two copies, this extra step is not a lost time at all.