P2 blank XML disaster?

N

nutra

Member
Hi, we recently shot a music video with an HVX and 2 4GB P2 cards downloading footage to a USB drive as we went along. the shoot went very smoothly and i was impressed with the workflow and there were no noticeable delays due to offloading footage to a drive, but today while attempting to import all the footage into FCP using the P2 import we find that about 7 of about 20 cards dumped will not import at all (corrupt file error)

a little digging around shows that the unworking XML files are blank - but the MXF files seem to all be there - is there anyway to regenerate a new XML file? we tried to copy working XML files and changing the media names but there is too much there to really fix by hand without knowing more about the format

i'm told they tried using the 'fix' tool on the HVX but it did nothing and i'm not sure if the files played back on the camera since i was not there at the time.


any ideas what might have caused this? and any way to salvage video from the MXF files? i tried looking here but short terms like 'P2'. 'MXF', and 'XML' will not search

thanks,
aron
 
I haven't heard of anything like this, so I doubt the search would have helped anyway...

Do you know anyone with Avid XPress Pro HD 5.2 or later? With XPress Pro you can copy the audio and video MXF files into the avid mediafiles/mxf/1 directory and import them using the media tool. It doesn't need the XML files at all. You may find that your footage is fine that way.

Reconstructing an XML doesn't seem like it would be too hard, just load a working XML into a text editing program and change whatever would be necessary for the missing ones. But I have to say that sounds really, really weird -- why would the XML files be trashed but everything else works?
 
Does Raylight rely on the XML files? If not, perhaps you could use that to convert to AVIs... provided you have access to a PC, anyway.
 
Indeed -- Raylight doesn't use the XML's at all, so that's another option.

I mentioned Avid only in the context that it would be able to directly import the files in order to know if they're valid. But downloading the Raylight demo would indeed give you the same capability -- thanks for pointing that out!
 
i have access to avid Xpress and Newscutter at work but not Xpress HD

the trashed XML files is odd - even stranger it's not every other card load so it's not one of the P2 cards - and get this - 4 or 5 sequential dumps are bad and then a few good ones and then a few bad ones - so the problem dumps were sequential to a degree - havent had time to look further into this but i believe all the bad parts are shooting 720P at 60fps but other 60 fps shots came it ok

i'm going to look into Raylight right now since it sounds like our only option at this point, and yes we do have access to a PC

thank you both very much - i'll report back if anything is changed - and once everything is working i could possibly share a few stills and the final video with the dvxuser community
 
raylight saves the day

raylight saves the day

the raylight demo worked so well we ended up buying the full version and we are currently editing the video in premiere 6.5 with the raylight codec

the raylight / mxf workflow is pretty smooth and is surprisingly quick with playing and previewing video at red (real time setting)

only a few odd bugs have popped up such as premiere incorrectly building some previews with raylight set to yellow or blue

nothing new on the corrupt xml files but it probably happened while copying to the external HDD
 
After lots of headaches and even more cursing i realized i had the same problem... blank XML files. I was however able to rebuild them. It was a long process involving a mxf unwrapper and an XML editor but i was finally able to import all of my
'corrupt" footage into FCP. Just thought I'd share that there is actually a way of fixing this. Still not sure how they got damaged in the first place though. I think it was the transfer from the P2 card to the P2 stor. I'm thinking of having a friend write a program that will gather all the info from the metadata and then do all the math needed, automatically. I'm sure there are more than just the two of us that have had this problem and this fix does work. Best of luck.
 
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