Humm...

First off, Avid no longer own Pinnacle - Corel do. Secondly, Media Composer costs about £1500. The provision of professional codecs and levels of support really aren't in the budget of a £100 piece of consumer software.

Now that Pinnacle products (such as the old Liquid) no longer have to avoid competing with Avid products, there is room for Pinnacle Studio to grow upwards. I'd love to see S16 be able to handle MXF and other XDCam files, but I'd expect to see that come at a price. Most people who can afford XDCam can afford to pay more for the software as well

Compare with Edius and Sony Vegas. If you buy the consumer versions they are comparable in price with PS. To buy the versions that can handle professional codecs, they cost over £500.

Your research has been very helpful though -  we now have a workround, and you might have saved a lot of people a lot of money :-)

Hi jjn

Personally, I would be prepared to pay more for an enhanced product. Studio is much more user-friendly than some of the so called premium brands like Sony Vegas Pro and Premier Pro. It also is the only program that I am aware of that can permit the runing of a real time clock from the plug in that you so kindly assisted me in locating some while ago. That is invaluable for my football videos and no other program will allow me to do that.

 

I know what you say about codecs but I would have thought that it was no more expensive from a developers point of view to provide this and open up the product for some users that might not otherwise have considered it. It would be nice to have the option to pay more and acquire the necessary plug in.

I have still to do the testing following your suggested settings for MediaCoder. I will keep you posted.

Only Pinnacle can really explain the reasoning behind which features they chose to devote R&D to. I personally don't think adding 3D to PS16 was a worthwhile feature, but to the few people who do have the equipment it was essential :-). I would have far preferred the sort of professional enhancements you are requesting.for PS15.

BTW, if you are considering PS16 at any time, give the Trial version a whirl first. It's a very different program to PS15.

 

Hi jjn

I now have three clips in MediaCoder. How do I batch convert them?

I might have worked it out. Tried Select All option and then transcode.

Boy do they take some time to load into Pinnacle. The first clip is 13 minutes duration and has probably almost taken 13 minutes to load. I am going to have to be very patient when doing a football match.

I suppose that there is no way of batch loading files into Pinnacle is there? Otherwise I am going to have to keep returning to see if clips have loaded before selecting the next one. I suppose I could try loading them in the import section and then selecting all.

The clips are still spliting when loading into Pinnacle. The 13 minute clip appeared as four clips with no logical reason for it as the camera was running constantly during the 13 minute recording time with any pause/stop recording.

Are you sure you aren't running with scene detection turned on?

By Load, do you just mean bring them up in the Album, or put them on the timeline?

I have not selected scene detection anywhere. I thought that would only kick in if the camera was paused during recording, otherwise I would get a continous clip. That was what happened with my HDV camera. When recording a football match it spit the clips into the first and second half.

Come to think of it, scene detection might be selected in the importer which I am not using to load these clips. Wouold that make a difference? Yes, by loading I mean bringing them into Pinnacle.

Even if you try to open a file without using the importer, the default scene detection will occur, but you should see a progress bar while it happens. If the files isn't HDV or DV, the default detection is "by content" and it is looking for shot changes - and has to scan the whole file.

Go into the Importer and switch off scene detection and see if that speeds up the opening of the files in the album.

Hi jjn

Yes, I have already done that to see if the scene loads as one. I have discovered something else though whilst in the Import section. I am able to select the clips in that section (the converted ones, I mean) but these have precisely the same affect as the original MP4 files. They freeze Pinnacle and so obviously I don't have the option of loading clips into the program that way. It does seem strange though.

The clip does load quicker with the scene detection turned off and has loaded as a single clip.

I have checked the lip sync on speaking into the camera mike and it is perfect. I don't know if it might eventually run out over a long sequence though as this one was quite short.

 

Looking Good Bob

Let us know how a long project works out

I think it might be a little while before I have a longer project, but, rest assured, I will report back with the result. As you stated earlier, there are benefits in others reading these threads as they may have similar problems and it is therefore important that a conclusion is made to the discussion.

Hi again jjn

 

Earlier in this thread you mentioned Studio 16. I might be interested in trying it but need to know whether the real time clock plug in will work with that version.

http://hlinke.de/wiki/index.php5?title=ClockDisplay_RTFxV2

David Hunt:

http://hlinke.de/wiki/index.php5?title=ClockDisplay_RTFxV2

Hi David

Many thanks for the link but unfortunately I cannot find anything on the site that says whether the plug in will operate in Studio 16.

Thanks David. Just to confirm that I've installed that in PS16 as well,

PS16 also has a montage theme called Timecode. It doesn't do just minutes and seconds, though, just hours minutes and seconds.

Thanks for the confirmation jjn. I will look at giving PS16 a go once I have finished messing around with the camera. The montage theme would not be suitable for my needs if it dos not do minutes and seconds only.

My pleasure Jeff

Many thanks for the link but unfortunately I cannot find anything on the site that says whether the plug in will operate in Studio 16.

Studio 16 is the next version of Avid Studio.

(This is really confusing a lot of people)

It's actually possible to apply an effect to the Montage to crop off the hours digits, so it's not unusable, However, Harold's effect is easier to use.

Having decided to take a look at the free trial download for Studio 16 I gave up as my very slow internet connection would take 15 hours to download it!

I will just have to rely upon the good people on here to answer any questions that I may have and read up as much as I am able from the website before eventually taking the plunge and parting with my money.

Hi jjn

 I have encountered another problem now that I have attempted a larger sized project.

Windows XP work on a FAT32 file system which has a limit of 4GB per file imported. Because I am importing a long continuous clip windows is splitting it up into portions of appromately 13 minutes each. This means that if I have shot 25 clips that are individually longer than 13 minutes, I end up with 50 clips and have the job of joining them all up together again.

I have been searching the web to find a solution to the problem and found a website where someone suggests what appears to be a easy answer, which is to change the hard drive from FAT32 to NTFS.

He suggests doing it by going through 'Start> Run' and then entering C:\> convert Drive Name: / fs : ntfs

Do you think this would work and is it likely to cause any other problems?

It seems odd that your drive is fat32 - is there any reason why ir might be? Yes, I suggest you do the conversion, but read up on it. From memory it shouldn't loose you any data, and everything about NTFS is better.

BTW, if you are running XP, you shouldn't buy S16 - it won't install.

Hi jjn

 

Went into the Command section and discovered that the drive is already NFTS which rather shoots down the theory of the clips being split.

 

Sony Professional are absolutely useless. All they want to do is sell you the camera and run.

 

Since the drive is correctly assigned I am at a loss as to why the files are coming in split.

 

If I hear any more I will let you know.

I have received a belated reply from Sony Professional who say that the FAT32 relates to the way the SxS cards record the data and consequently, the clips are split before they even reach my computer. He assures me that all XDCAM cameras operate with this limitation.

 Had I known it before spending loads of money on a camera I would not have bought it, despite its glorious picture quality as the task of editing has been made considerably longer in having either to marry up clips in the clip browser before export or combining them all and then having to split them up on the timeline, not to mention the additional task of converting the files in Media Coder to import them successfully into Studio.

I am embarking on my first serious project with this camera this weekend and will be interested to see just how onerous the task is.

Hi jjn

 

I have already encountered a problem with combining clips on the timeline. Because of the 4 GB file size limit, I am having to combine the first part of a motor race with the second part on the time line but Studio will not always permit this action. It does say in the manual that Studio will only combine clips that will run as continuous excerpt of the source video. The clips concerned meet that criterion but still Studio will not allow them to be combined.

 Do you know of any workaround for this?

You may wonder why it is so vital to combine the clips if they run seamlessly. The reason is that the races were timed (15 minutes duration rather than a set number of laps) and I run the time clock with them to keep track of the the time elapsed. Obviously, the clock needs to have no timeline breaks to operate correctly.

 

That is something that is true of all clips - you can't joint them together unless they previously came from the same file and have continous timecode.

To add timecode to a section of a project in PS15 and earlier, regardless of the way the clips are divided, you can add them to a blank title on the title track, stretching the title to cover the section of the project over which you want the timecode to run.

The Montage plug-in in S16 can have its start time defined, and the plug-in written by Harold Linke is even better. But remember what I said about S16 not being compatible with XP.

 

Here is a thread which discusses the joining of clips.

http://forums.pinnaclesys.com/forums/thread/488009.aspx

Basically the clips should be joined before transcoding and used in Studio.