Tagged with missing - Personal View Talks

Tip for importing 'missing' GH2 clips in Final Cut Pro X

arvidtp — Mon, 04 May 2015 22:52:04 +0000

Often I find that when I go to import footage from an SD card I've shot on my GH2 (hacked, settings are Sanity 5.1 or Sanity X) Final Cut X's import window will not see some earlier video clips I'd shot (and not yet imported). I discovered after a recent shoot that if I turned the camera off, changed the battery, turned it back on and kept shooting, only the clips shot after the battery change were visible to FCPX. So, after cursing at FCPX as I am wont to do, I started copying the .MTS files (which thankfully are always still there on the card) and preparing for the annoying process of concatenating spanned clips by hand and re-wrapping them all, when I hit upon the idea of seeing if I could just repair the AVCHD file structure.

Well, it turns out to be pretty simple. It seems that when the GH2 is power cycled, it makes a new playlist in the AVCHD structure (you can tell because there are multiple .MPL files in PRIVATE/AVCHD/BDMV/PLAYLIST/), and FCPX only sees clips from the most recent playlist with no way to switch to another playlist.

After a little hunting with a hex editor, I found that PRIVATE/AVCHD/BDMV/INDEX.BDM tells the importing software (at least in the case of FCPX) which playlist to look at. There is a number at the end that matches the number of the most recent playlist file (eg 00001) for 00001.MPL. So if you import the visible footage, you can then backup INDEX.BDM and use a hex editor to change that last number in it to the number of the previous playlist. You're just changing a single byte! Save, then open the FCPX import window again (maybe you need to relaunch FCPX? - don't remember) and the clips that were missing will probably be there. I assume you could repeat the process if you had 3 or more AVCHD playlist files on the card.

for a free hex editor on mac, I recommend Hex Fiend: http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/22589/hex-fiend

Don't use a normal text editor – more than that single byte will probably change and you'll be sorry.

So to summarize

If missing clips in FCPX import:

import what you can see
check for the presence of multiple .MPL files
change the 5 digit number (eg 00001) in INDEX.BDM to refer to a different .MPL file
import again in FCPX - missing clips should show up

attached are some screenshots of changing the contents of INDEX.BDM.

Hope this tidbit of knowledge helps some people out. I wish I had discovered it a year ago – would have saved me some aggravation for sure.

Is there software for a particular kind of frame repair?

Brian_Siano — Sat, 26 Apr 2014 18:43:54 +0000

I'm editing a project where, in some of the footage, the cameraperson seems to have left their auto-focus on. As a result, there are occasional moments where the footage goes slightly out of focus for a few frames. (Also, there are single-frame gaps where the cameras' *.MTS files don't quite sync up.)

Basically speaking, I have a situation where I may want to insert frames that are generated from the surrounding frames. For example, if I have a one-frame gap between 00001.MTS and 00002.MTS, I'd like to generate that frame from the last frame of 00001 and the first frame of 00002. Or, perhaps I could find those moments when the camera goes out of focus, snip those frames out, and generate new replacement frames.

I'm sure there's software that does this that might be affordable. It may even be in After Effects, for all I know, and I'll go check that package out. But does anyone have any knowledge of such a thing?

Audio Missing from Clip

matt_gh2 — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 18:16:21 +0000

Shot some test clips with GH2 and imported into Premiere Pro CS6 windows. Some of the clips had the audio portion completely missing. The clip also appeared pink in color when dragged into the timeline. When I right clicked to check properties, there was no info on audio, where usually it will have bit rate and sample rate listed. Was using Boom v1 setting, which I've done plenty of times in the past with no problem, until now. Anybody come across this or know the cause and solution? Thanks.

PTTools Feature Request - Camera/Owner ID

duartix — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 06:36:16 +0000

Would it be simple to have some kind of personal digital signature available as a hack parameter?

Something that would make it to every photo you took via EXIF information. I think it would be very useful if we could use PTTools to define a small text signature (ex: "This camera belongs to John Doe, 1000 - Planet Earth, North Pole: john_doe@earth.org").

This way, if your body gets stolen and assuming there is a 50% chance that it ends in hack ignorant hands, you have a meaningful chance to see some traces of it surfacing the Web in the form of pictures taken with that camera.

P.S. - I posted here because my searches for feature requests threads were fruitless.