basspig
Veteran
Used a Canon HF-S200 as a mini-cam sitting on a small ledge in the orchestra shell of a symphony hall last night for the Conductor face shots. Several other cameras were all Sony XDCam models.
First challenge was getting AVCHD into my editor. TMPGenc 4.0 XPress took care of this.
I got all the footage synched, but I found that at spefic points in the timeline, the Canon footage would be 5 frames ahead of the other three cams. At first I thought it was clock drift, but no, it was stable up to a certain time and then, boom.. a sudden skip in the motion and the rest out of synch beyond that point on the Canon.
So I checked the original MTS files, and the one where this break occurs, right at the beginning, it has a brief freeze frame, just where I saw the freeze in the Premiere timeline. And it's right at the beginning of the third MTS file in a seqence about 55 minutes total. In the second half of the concert, there was another glitch of the same sort--5 frames still/frozen, then a bunch skipped until the footage was five frames ahead of the other cams again.
What appears to be happening is that the HF-S200 SOMETIMES drops frames when opening the next 2GB file for writing. Not every time, just 1/3rd of the time.
Maybe I'm expecting too much from a consumer camcorder and I've worked around the shortcomings of picture quality and compression artifacts, but this just plain makes multicamera editing a pain. I spent half a day tracking down the jumps in timing and cutting and re-timing the Canon footage. I could have been done editing the concert by now, were it not for this.
I wonder if perhaps it's a write buffering problem. I'm using a Patriot class 4 32GB card that got a five star rating by NewEgg customers that bought it.
I Googled the problem and some people claim the video plays without the dropped frames in the camera, but not in an NLE. TMPGenc should have seamlessly reassembled the bits with its ability to combine to one file. So what's the latest on this issue? Solutions, workarounds?
First challenge was getting AVCHD into my editor. TMPGenc 4.0 XPress took care of this.
I got all the footage synched, but I found that at spefic points in the timeline, the Canon footage would be 5 frames ahead of the other three cams. At first I thought it was clock drift, but no, it was stable up to a certain time and then, boom.. a sudden skip in the motion and the rest out of synch beyond that point on the Canon.
So I checked the original MTS files, and the one where this break occurs, right at the beginning, it has a brief freeze frame, just where I saw the freeze in the Premiere timeline. And it's right at the beginning of the third MTS file in a seqence about 55 minutes total. In the second half of the concert, there was another glitch of the same sort--5 frames still/frozen, then a bunch skipped until the footage was five frames ahead of the other cams again.
What appears to be happening is that the HF-S200 SOMETIMES drops frames when opening the next 2GB file for writing. Not every time, just 1/3rd of the time.
Maybe I'm expecting too much from a consumer camcorder and I've worked around the shortcomings of picture quality and compression artifacts, but this just plain makes multicamera editing a pain. I spent half a day tracking down the jumps in timing and cutting and re-timing the Canon footage. I could have been done editing the concert by now, were it not for this.
I wonder if perhaps it's a write buffering problem. I'm using a Patriot class 4 32GB card that got a five star rating by NewEgg customers that bought it.
I Googled the problem and some people claim the video plays without the dropped frames in the camera, but not in an NLE. TMPGenc should have seamlessly reassembled the bits with its ability to combine to one file. So what's the latest on this issue? Solutions, workarounds?
