C100: Continuous Recording

M

Matt Turner

Well-known member
Wondering if anyone had any luck with the new Continuous Recording feature of the C100 in the latest firmware update. I haven't found much info online. I've reposted my results posted to the firmware thread to start a discussion...

Initial tests after a quick play with continuous recording:

I recorded 5 start/stops using the continuous recording over a two minute recording period:

Opening the SD card STREAM folder shows 1 MTS (full length 2 minute recording).
Mac Finder shows 5 clips in the Quicktime viewer (numbered 0 to 4, correctly marked recordings).
Adobe Premiere CC imports only one continuous clip of the full length recording.
FCPX shows 5 clips (numbered 1 to 5) in the import window, however they are duplicates of the full clip and they do not import (Import All/Selected does nothing).

I guess we wait for software vendors to catch up, unless someone else has better luck with it...
 
The Continuous Recording in that you mark ins and outs as you record?

This only works for Grass Valley's Edius edit software. Nice editor, PC only. We're Mac users. We'll have to wait and see if Apple will support this, and considering how they've supported the rather odd PsF from Canon (or not, as is the case) I'm not holding my breath. I had heard a few things about the software update at the BVE show in the UK, e.g. 'move AF spot from centre' and a process to fix the 'one audio in, two different levels', and it transpires that this revision isn't quite as exciting as we'd hoped. This seems to be the only 'feature' (or is it in preparation for the Dual Pixel AF thing? Maybe the movable focus area is ONLY for the DPAF LOL)

There's another part of the news for C100 users which was an update to the Pixela Data Import Utility (v1 on the CD-ROM in the box, v2 available from http://www.pixela.co.jp/oem/canon/e/dataimportutility_ver2/ ). Not sure what was done, haven't tested it out yet, but hey. Fresh meat.

FWIW, the Continuous Recording feature may be more of a marketing 'feature match' exercise with similar cameras. If this sort of feature is of interest (e.g. conference and presentation records) then the Ninja Blade 'smart editing' thing (set 'Favourite' and 'Reject' areas of a clip on the fly or on replay) would seem to be far more useful. I'm playing with this feature over the next few days (when I really should be editing - 9 presentations, each to be 5 mins or less - could have done with a Ninja Blade on THAT shoot LOL).
 
MattDavis said:
This only works for Grass Valley's Edius edit software.
Click to expand...
Nice. I thought that was some kind of marketing angle because surely they wouldn't release a feature that only 0.1% of editors would actually be able to use. Though I'm sure it will trickle out to other NLEs, it's essentially a non event. I was interested because I thought I could be useful for events, just tap on/off while the camera is continuously rolling.
 
It's an interesting feature. I presume that it may be useful in multi-cam, but the issue is 'how do I know when a good bit is about to happen?'

I mean, there's the Cache Record - so you're always recording, but only record the last 4-7 seconds before the button was pressed to the card. I do use this a lot.

But the other side is... do we bump the camera whilst trying to press the buttons? I see that with cache record done in a hurry/panic.

And my thought, because I've just bought a Ninja Blade and I'm thoroughly in love with it, why not just use the Favourite/Reject shot marking? It's brilliant. Let's say I'm recording a presentation, there's a great quote so I do a quick jab of the favourite button. When I import that, I know that less than a second of Favourite means 'the bit before this was good'. So, I'm not actually marking ins and outs, I'm adding what was once called an 'essence' marker (not a 'shot' marker that refers to the whole clip). And whoop-de-do, this valuable metadata actually makes its way into Premiere and Final Cut Pro!

So perhaps the new update is a bit 'meh' for non Edius users, but let's see if it does anything for the DPAF converts... Meanwhile, loving my Ninja.
 
Matt Turner said:
What NLEs does that support? Last time I looked I thought it was only FCPX... have you tried it with Premiere? I'll have to revisit it.
Click to expand...

I'm close to admitting defeat with both FCP7 and Premiere using Xto7 to convert the XML that the Ninja creates. I thought it would be relatively simple, but no. Atomos really have done their homework.

I will have another go tonight and check through some examples of XML, see if its just nomenclature.
 
Hold on, hold on - we're getting confused here.

Continuous Recording with in and out points as an EDL is an Edius thing - Windows only. No idea if the EDL thing will be supported by other NLEs at this stage.

Pixela software is for joining the recording of a shot that spans two SDHC cards into one contiguous file. That's available for Mac and Windows. And the fact that it's been upped from version 1 to version 2 was announced at the same time as the Continuous Recording facility.

The two are only related in that the ability to mark points on long recordings would probably mean spanning disks at some point, so Pixela needed to update to incorporate this.
 
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