"Incomplete" P2 clips

Ted Spencer

Ted Spencer

Veteran
In a concert shoot over the weekend using two new, freshly re-formatted 16 GB cards (and two 8's), I got several instances of a continuous shot coming out as several 9:53 second "incomplete" clips that when put together in FCP, were contiguous. Ultimately, it's not a real problem because everything's there and plays fine, but it didn't happen every time, so I'm wondering what to make of it.

All the incomplete clips were *exactly* the same 9:53 (and some specific number of frames) length. In other cases the card recorded one clip continuously for a longer time, or "spanned" to the next (an 8 GB).

There were two 16 GB cards involved, so maybe there was some difference there. I don't know if it only affected one of the cards though, since they were being changed and dumped rather quickly. Anyone know what the deal is?
 
The FAT32 file system supports a maximum file size of 4GB. So on a 16GB card, if you recorded in 1080 mode for 16 minutes, you'd end up with four 4GB files, all "spanned" together.
 
I discovered this quirk also when I shot a live event and one clip ran 40 minutes. I hadn't thought about the 4GB limit.

Interestingly, in FCP, you get the "incomplete clip" tag. But in Premiere Pro, it puts one long clip together, and it does it as many times as there are segments, and it calls them all the same thing. You can imagine my confusion (I can see clips on the P2 that didn't seem to import), until I finally figured it out. crazy.
 
Barry_Green said:
The FAT32 file system supports a maximum file size of 4GB. So on a 16GB card, if you recorded in 1080 mode for 16 minutes, you'd end up with four 4GB files, all "spanned" together.
Click to expand...

The odd thing is that some of the clips were longer, like 14.5 minutes continuous. Others cut themselves up into 9:53 segments. It might be easier to understand if it had it been consistent, but it wasn't.

Some "spanned", some were "incomplete" and needed to be manually reassembled in FCP, yet some were longer but complete.

Still don't exactly get the inconsistency.
 
In any P2-aware NLE you don't have to stitch, all the clips are assembled for you in the correct order automatically. You can then render out to a new file if you wish, and on an HFS or NTFS volume, you'd be able to output to one single large file.
 
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