Archiving .mts file advice?

F

firehawk

Veteran
It's my understanding that the safe way is to copy the entire contents of the "private" folder on the sdhc card to your computer for editing. Do not pick and choose clips or problems can occur such as spanning for long clips. Copy the whole thing and do not change anything.

Ok, so after the project is finished and you only want to save certain clips, how do you do that so that in the future your NLE will be able to work with it again? Can you just copy the .mts files you want to keep to your backup storage media, or will that introduce the very same risk of problems like cherry picking the choice individual clips off the card in the first place?
 
Seriously I haven't ever had a problem with the MTS files only so maybe I'm lucky? Maybe the split for me was in a place that wasn't important? I just dump the MTS files in a folder in the client's folder and it's all kept on a 2.5TB drive so I can go back whenever I need to...If your files are consistently longer than the 4GB limit then I would most definately copy the whole folder as Barry suggests and keep absolutely everything intact and correct so it all matches up!! It can be an issue if you have a lot of unused clips (I'm old-school where we had to do linear edits so I tend to shoot for editing so I use almost all my clips)

Drive space is so darn cheap nowdays you might as well just keep everything just in case deleting one or two MTS files messes up the structure. Even at long weddings and long speeches where the clip might exceed 4GB I tend to stop and restart the camera at convenient points so my clips seldom, if ever go over 4GB.

Chris
 
Hi Chris,
And thank you for chiming in.

I tend to (but not always) shoot a significant amount of extra footage during many of my projects, whether it's extra takes or simply extra "stuff" just in case I may need the material. But once in the edit room I see what I really want and dont need and in the past just saved .Avis of the specific scenes I wanted to keep. Not sure how to do that now with these .mts files. I dont want to mess things up. Like you said, storage is pretty cheap now so maybe I'll just save the whole thing and be safe.
 
Technically as long as you don't have any split files in the stream folder then you don't need to keep the structure. If you just browse thru the stream folder and see if you have any 3.99GB file sizes then you have to preserve the structure..however if not you can just save the MTS files that you need. I have stored maybe close to 300 weddings without preserving the file structure and all work perfectly in Sony Vegas BUT none are split files!!

Dunno about your NLE, but in Vegas I also have the option to save a project WITH stored media so it will only save MTS files that have been used in the project and ignore the rest that you never used.

Chris
 
I just archive the files and their folders (complete structure) to data DVDs or BluRay discs. I edit Mac FCP at work and Premiere at home. I'm covered with whichever system I import/log&transfer my files to- The space required for the file structure is so incredibly small that I can't imagine NOT saving it. Maybe that metadata will be important some day?
 
What I do is export my processed ( color and contrast corrected ) video clips using the 10-bit Cineform CODEC, which is an "editing" CODEC that preserves all of the original image information and makes the archived clips ready for editing at any time. The Cineform CODEC files also have the advantage of working seamlessly on both Mac and Windows platforms. ( the Cineform CODEC has to be installed on both platforms ) Cineform also provide a free player that enables anyone to open the Cineform files as long as they install the free player on their system.

The Video-Guys website sells the Cineform NEO SCENE software for $100, which is $30 less than buying it directly from the GoPro folks. ( GoPro bought Cineform last year )

Cineform NEO SCENE for Mac or Win : $100 from VideoGuys.com
 
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