Footage Errors - Need help

Lanz_Alentzia

Lanz_Alentzia

New member
I recently got an HMC40 from Amazon, and have started trying to get a feel for it. Unfortunately, I often encounter a very significant problem with it: The footage I record, by the time I look at it on my laptop, is marred by various forms of tearing and graphical glitches.

This happens when I look at the raw MTS files through a viewer, like Media Player Classic, or through the editing program I'm using, Sony Vegas Movie Studio 9.

Whenever I look at the clips through the viewer of the HMC40, these look fine, with none of the tearing that's present when I view them on my laptop.

I don't imagine it's a problem with the camera, as I've had it just around 2 weeks now, give or take, and I've taken good care of it. I wonder if it's the laptop not having the power to work with the footage (it's a Toshiba Satellite running Vista, with an AMD Turion 64 X2 Mobile Technology TL-58 1.90GHz processor and 2GB of RAM) or something to do with the SDHC Cards I'm using (two 8GB, Class 6 SanDisk Extreme SDHC cards).

What can I do to properly view the video I've shot with my camera, without all the terrible marring? Am I out of luck until I work with a more powerful system? :(
 
You don't have any problem with the camera. Play it back out of the camera to a television and you'll see that it's just fine.

But it's not easy to play full HD h.264 footage on a computer, and that's what you're running into.

Many people find that transcoding to a different codec, such as NeoScene, helps them get full-screen full-frame-rate playback, but that's not a free option.

Depending on your NLE, your choice of graphics card can help too; Premiere CS4 improves greatly with an nVidia CUDA graphics card.

But, in short -- don't worry about it. Your footage is fine, your NLE is handling it fine, and your final product will look fine. It's just that your computer can't play the footage in its full frame rate without tearing. If you rendered the footage out in another codec (for Vegas, try MPEG-2) it should be able to play full-screen no problem.
 
Barry_Green said:
You don't have any problem with the camera. Play it back out of the camera to a television and you'll see that it's just fine.

But it's not easy to play full HD h.264 footage on a computer, and that's what you're running into.

Many people find that transcoding to a different codec, such as NeoScene, helps them get full-screen full-frame-rate playback, but that's not a free option.

Depending on your NLE, your choice of graphics card can help too; Premiere CS4 improves greatly with an nVidia CUDA graphics card.

But, in short -- don't worry about it. Your footage is fine, your NLE is handling it fine, and your final product will look fine. It's just that your computer can't play the footage in its full frame rate without tearing. If you rendered the footage out in another codec (for Vegas, try MPEG-2) it should be able to play full-screen no problem.
Click to expand...

Thank you sir, that's a load of stress off my mind. And thank you also for the NeoScene recommendation. I remember hearing about Format Factory, might that work as well?

EDIT: I assume the odd, purplish (and other colors) artifacts that appear in the footage from time to time are also just the computer being unable to playback the footage properly? I haven't gotten a screencap yet, but that may do better for explaining them than I can do verbally at the moment

EDIT2: screenshots of the above
http://img52.imageshack.us/img52/7096/shotone.jpg
http://img688.imageshack.us/img688/7782/shot2r.jpg
http://img197.imageshack.us/img197/3845/shot3d.jpg
 
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The purple artifacts are also from Vegas.. I believe there is an update to fix it.
Did you get the camera new? If so it should have came with a copy of Edius Neo 2.5 booster. Try that and see if it plays/edit better on your system.
 
ATL Media Group said:
The purple artifacts are also from Vegas.. I believe there is an update to fix it.
Did you get the camera new? If so it should have came with a copy of Edius Neo 2.5 booster. Try that and see if it plays/edit better on your system.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I ordered it off amazon, and looks like the thing came straight from Japan, given the shipping labels. The odd part is though that the artifacts appear when I play it in MPC too. I'll try installing Edius soon then and see how it works like that then, as well as trying to convert the files too like Mr. Green suggested.
 
Here are some Edius Neo 2.5 examples of it's RT performance:

On an i5 laptop with 4GB memory.


Now with HDSLR and AVCHD from the HMC40 on an i7 920 desktop.


That's full frame, full rez with no artifacts.

I do notice some minor tearing when I put on extensive filters in Edius 5.5 like when using ProDad Vitascene film looks, but it's still VERY good and plays back in full RT.

Vegas seems pretty good too, but only if you playback at a lower rez (automatic) and then it still has tearing with no filters applied.
Premiere Pro CS5 works better than CS4 for AVCHD but still nowhere near as good for RT as Edius unless you get a new $400 video card.
 
Okay, I am over here at a friends place, testing the footage on his i7 iMac. Looking at the footage, while the visual tearing is no longer present, the bizarre, multicolor artifacts remain. Currently I am running the footage off the SDHC card from the camera and into his HDTV over HDMI and the artifacting is present there as well.

I have noticed that it tends to create the artifacts whenever I change the exposure of the camera, but is in no way exclusive to that change, sometimes flaring up even when the exposure is left unchanged.

EDIT: Well, that was somewhat unexpected. Turns out, the problem seemed to be that I didn't format my SDHC card, and that was apparently causing the problems. Trying out 3 different cards, including the aforementioned one, properly formatted, produced footage without the errors that had been occurring.
 
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okay, and I'm back to having problems, but a bizarre change:

Went out to a place in Richmond to get some footage to get some practice in with the camera. Same camera, same memory cards (which, near as I can remember, I formatted previously) and so on. A couple weeks later, my friend and I get together at his place to try and edit the footage a bit on his aforementioned i7 iMac. We put the footage on there via iMovie (it's the only NLE he has on there). Aside from needing to convert the clips one at a time, everything goes fine. The footage looks good; no marring, no damage, just crisp, clean footage.

Fast forward a few days to this previous weekend. I decide, so I can try to edit it at home, to try converting the clips to MP4 by using Format Factory, which I saw recommended in The HMC Book. So, I download that, and then move my footage off of my SD Cards directly onto an external hard drive. I change nothing, putting the contents of the cards into two folders labeled Card 1 and Card 2.

I do that. Takes a day to convert all the clips, but it gets done.

I look at the clips that have been converted... and the weird glitches are back. The exact same type as before. And they're present in both the converted files and the raw MTS files. I am viewing the footage through Media Player Classic to view both the MTS and the converted files

I have no earthly idea what could be the problem at this point. Am I damaging the files by moving them off the SDHC cards to my Hard drive? is my computer just not up to task? What on earth is going on. I have no idea what on earth is the problem and feeling like I have a camera I can't even take really use, because I can't do anything with the footage.
 
To reassure yourself (hopefully), download the trial of Cineform's NeoHD and transcode some of your footage (the trial version is full-featured, just limited to 10 days). My guess is your transcoded footage will play flawlessly.
 
Thanks, I'll check into it. Currently testing another theory I have, that somehow I may have damaged the files by how I was putting them on the hard drive (I believe I'd been cutting in pasting them into it), with the SDHC Card being read being read directly by my laptop's built in card reader.

Currently checking footage that's, instead been copied of the SDHC card (while write protected) while still in the camera.

I don't know what difference it makes, but somehow, the footage I checked so far has, oddly enough, not suffered that damage that the other footage displays. Any idea why that could be?

I'll keep you guys updated as I try out the different things
 
How full is your hard drive - might be worth defragmenting before you copy further footage across? (By the way I often pull my SD card, put it in a reader and drag and drop to my hard drive ... maybe not the recommended way but it has always worked just fine).
 
The problem seems to be your laptop. Most likely its graphics card isn't up to the challenge. A 1.9GHz processor isn't really fast enough either, IMHO. And 2 GB of RAM is also a bit low for handling AVCHD.

I assume your external hard drive is connected via USB? I'd wonder if it's USB 1.0 or 2.0. I'd also wonder if the drive is 5400rpm or 7200rpm. All of this makes a difference.
 
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