Can someone send me some 5d footage?

P

pero

New member
Hi all,

I haven't worked with a 5d before, but I was recently hired on a gig to transfer 5d footage onto hard drives while on set. I would like to be familiar with the 5d file structure and the video files before starting this job. I was hoping that someone could shoot a single, very short shot (like 5 seconds) on their 5d and then zip all the contents of the CF card and send it to me via Yousendit or Dropbox or something. I want to see everything that would be on the CF card, including the video file and all the file structure.

Alternatively, if someone knows of a place where something like this is already available for download, let me know.

Thanks so much!
 
Short of sending you the files (I'm not really seeing the point there...) I'll elect to give you a rundown in good ol' fashioned text.

The base directory will have two folders, DCIM and MISC. The images and video files are further into the DCIM directory, whilst the MISC folder will hold files such as firmware updates and other things. Normally it will be empty unless the card hasn't been formatted.

Within the DCIM directory will be a folder(s) with the naming structure xxxEOS5D, where xxx is a folder number. The numbering starts at 100, and then goes up sequentially from there. Unless the user specifies another folder the camera will write all files to the default folder.

Within 100EOS5D is where the movie clips and images are contained. The default naming scheme for these files are MVI_xxxx.MOV and IMG_xxxx.CR2/JPG, where xxxx is a 4 digit shot counter. Depending on how the camera is configured, it will continuously proceed sequentially through shot numbers until it reaches 9999, or it will reset to 0001 each time a new card is inserted. Within this folder is also contained thumbnail files, which follow the same naming scheme as the movies, except they have the extension .THM. These aren't completely necessary, but I do believe that the Final Cut Pro EOS plugin uses these files when converting and importing the video files for timecode and other settings.

My advice would be to use something like Bridge or Aperture for importing the footage as they have very powerful batch rename functions and are specifically tailored to this sort of file management. They will automate much of the process for you as well, and you can create advanced scripts to automatically import & rename footage if you're willing to spend the time configuring the software. This isn't to say that it cannot be done within the default OS X/Windows interface, but it isn't specifically tailored towards this exact process and therefore requires a bit more cajoling to get it to do what you want.

I hope this was informative for you!

Regards,

Cal
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top