Trying to retrieve clip metadata on Mac

M

mikebarber

Active member
I finally had some time to go out and do a bunch of test shooting with my AF100. I loaded up the card with a bunch of scene files from Barry's book to play with in the woods nearby. The overcast sky and variety of closed and open spaces along the trail made for some great variety in shooting (lenses were Canon FD 50mm f/1.8 and 28mm f/2.8).

The AVCCAM footage is beautiful. Absolutely in love with this camera. However, now that I am home ingesting the clips (FCP 7.0.3) I am running into a frustration. My L&T speeds are fine (around 0.33x speeds transcoding to ProRes LT… meaning it only takes a third of the clip's duration to transcode), it's the seeming lack of access to the clip metadata.

For example, I can't readily see which clips I marked in camera without going through each one in L&T to see which has the Good box checked. This is admittedly an FCP shortcoming, not having that as an available column in L&T…

Right now, my biggest irritant is that I can't identify which scene file was used for which clip. :Drogar-Thinking(DBG Under a more professional scenario I would have kept a camera log, but this was a quick romp in the woods with my new toy, so I threw out all formalities.

The Panasonic AVCCAM Viewer for Mac is little more than a bad joke… the app doesn't even have an icon, for crying out loud! (Already having VLC Player and FCP, I can't identify any use for AVCCAM Viewer).

Any suggestions, tips, tricks, etc on how I can access this info?
 
Last edited:
Hi, The usefulness of AVCCAM Viewer is in the Metadata upload. Within that portion of the program you can see what data is saved. However the scene file is not part of that. As it stands the FCP application in an of itself has never been really respectful of metadata. I think only in the last generation or so did it see any of the P2 metadata. But I assume that if enough of their users tell them that they was this in FCP, they will eventually do this as they did with the P2.

Best,

Jan
 
Hi Jan, thanks for the reply. I love the images I have been able to get with the AF100. So far, I've just been playing around to get familiar with it, but the material is beautiful. The AVCCAM Viewer app is, unfortunately, not very intuitive and it seems that in order to access the clip metadata (which apparently is also not as robust as it could be, but I'll get that in a moment) I have to use the app itself to copy the SD card content to my computer first.

My normal, and preferred way, is to copy the entire card into a new folder (so it in effect mirrors the card) within my own folder structure appropriate to that particular project (from where I later use FCP L&T to transcode to ProRes). The way the app seems to work is to force me to copy all cards into a folder called AVCCAMVIEWER. If I don't want to use the default location of this folder (~/Movies/AVCCAMVIEWER) but for instance a subfolder on my "Projects" harddrive, the app forces me to still make an AVCCAMVIEWER folder. I also notice that the results of how the app copies a card onto my local drive and of a direct copy are slightly different! All the file extensions have an extra character when copied via the app (.CLP becomes .clpi and .MTS becomes .m2ts as examples).

The metadata would be significantly more useful if it included information about the camera used to record the clip. Knowing what profile settings, gain/ISO, white balance, shutter (not to mention some lens info if available) would be extremely valuable in a number of post production scenarios. I can't count how many times I've encountered a problem clip somewhere in post as an editor (being far removed from and having nothing to do with the shooting) and having or not having access to this kind of info made a significant difference on how much time was saved or wasted debugging the situation.

Basically, my point is that any data that can be included in the metadata should be included in the metadata, and leave it for the individual user to decide which bits of info are relevant or necessary for their use. If the AVCCAM app functioned more like Adobe's Bridge or Apple's Aperture (with respects to clip and metadata viewing), and the metadata was more robust, that would be better. I realize moving pictures and stills are different, but the amount of camera data I get back on a DSLR photo is extremely robust compared to what I seem to get back on the AF100.

I'm loving the camera, this is just one of those details that could be greatly improved upon to make a great camera even greater.
 
Last edited:
Well I don't think the AF100 will ever record the data that you want. Sorry. However I think if you go to Shot Put Pro, you would find a better app for working with the files themselves and I think he is working on a metadata app for the AVCHD.

I have been asking for more data to be recorded about camera settings and I think we will eventually get there, just not yet.

Best,

jan
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top