C100: mysterious disappearing MTS files

[edna millon]

Hello, having a weird Canon C100 problem that I've never seen before that maybe someone can help out with?

I'm shooting a big project with the C100 and my workflow is that I back up all my camera cards after shooting and later my editing assistant transcodes to prores. Today I was editing a scene that my assistant transcoded and logged a long time ago when I noticed that a lot of shots seemed to be missing. I double clicked on the original AVCHD file to open in Quicktime and saw that, indeed, about 20 shots had not been transcoded. But when I navigated to the same AVCHD folder in the Prelude ingest window, none of the missing clips showed up–all I could see was the same, smaller subset of clips that my assistant had transcoded. I then checked in the Finder, clicking on show package contents to navigate to the BDMV / Stream folder and - weirdly - in the Finder the missing clips are also invisible! However, the file size of the AVCHD folder is very large, 15 GB, which confirms that the missing clips are in there but just can't be accessed. The other strange thing is that when I am able to view the invisible clips, in QT, I also see that the numbering is really screwy. Some of the clips are numbered sequentially 1-22 (and these are the clips are easy to access) and the others, the invisible ones, have weird out-of-sequence numbering like 44, 32, numbers that don't make sense or go in order. I guess this is part of the problem... but I don't know how to rebuild the index for the BDMV folder.

I've done over 100 shoots for this project and have not seen this problem before - what gives and how to I access these invisible MTS files??

 

[NorBro]

It's a tough issue to troubleshoot without being in front of everything and understanding exactly what is happening - and I don't have an answer for you - but if you have the original AVCHD file structures from all of the missing footage, I would try to re-import/re-transcode them, and then try relinking your edit to that.

It sounds like some sort of corruption has occurred or the transcoding process was aborted, but I'm not sure.

 

[C-Mac]

If you are just trying to get the clips... Have you tried viewing the files in VLC? If you can view them in VLC you should be able to salvage them with other conversion programs. I had to this once... I can check my other computer to see if I can find the program I used.

Best Regards,

Chris

 

[drummondb]

If you still have the original card structures, you also might try using canon's data import utility that comes on a CD with the C100. It's specifically designed to read and transfer C100 avchd files, so maybe it will work better than Prelude?

It will read the avchd structure and spit out just single MTS files with unique names, rather than the hugely complicated avchd folder structure where every single MTS file is named the same (000.mts, etc..). It will even stitch together spanned long takes into single files. The only downfall as far as I remember is that you'll lose embedded timecode on C100mk1 files (mk2 files transferred this way keep the timecode). But that is almost never a deal breaker for me.