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I have had some problems with Liquid through the years which has been a major irritation but never got around to asking about it.

 

Well it happened again last night and this time I decided to see if anyone can tell me what is going on.

 

It is hard to describe in a sentence so I will just explain exactly what I am doing and what Liquid does.

 

I capture analogue video using a Canopus ADVC-300  unit via the firewire port. Primarily old TV programs I want to save to DVD after editing out commercials.

 

I open the capture window and capture an Episode of Adam-12

(half-hour program).

I enter Adam12-1 as the file name and start the capture.

After the show ends I close the Capture window and check it on the timeline  to see if it “ really did” capture all of it ( sometimes it doesn’t).

I got it all.

 

I open the Capture window again and save another episode labeled Adam12-2.

Close the window and check it.

It is also okay.

 

Finally, I open the Window again and capture an episode of It Takes a Thief ( 1 hour program).

Check it and it is also okay.

 

Close Liquid until the next day.

 

The next day I open the “It Takes a Thief” file and edit out commercials and save as Mpeg elementary stream so it can be burned later to disk using Adobe Encore.

 

This is where it gets weird.

 

Next I open the Adam12-1 file to edit and instead of it being the original program I captured it is a portion of the It Takes a Thief program.

 

Open the other Adam-12 file and it is also a portion of the It Takes a Thief program.

 

In spite of the fact that I captured two Adam-12’s and checked them they are now something else. Liquid just overwrote them with a segment from another captured file and the original Adam-12’s are long gone.

 

I still have the three files listed exactly as they were the night before but two of them are now something else. I look  through all the reels folders and can’t find the missing Adam-12 avi files anywhere.

 

Now I have to go back and recapture the Adam-12’s all over again.

 

This doesn’t happen all the time but it does it enough that I no longer trust Liquid to capture more than one program at the time. I feel the need to capture, edit , and export one show at the time in the fear Liquid will pull this trick on me again.

 

Can anyone tell me why it is doing this and how I can prevent it?

 

This happens with irritating regularity and it makes no sense how the file and the video match when I capture it but later turns into something else when I go back to edit.

 

This is a common user mistake. When capturing you MUST give a new reel name for each separate piece of media. If you re-use the same reel name, it will overwrite what's on the reel already. It's not the clip name that determines the actual file name used, but the reel name.

Thank you very much.

 This has been driving me crazy for years.

I bought and have watched the entire Mind Meld Series several times through they years and never realized the true significance of the reels.

Guess I should have paid closer attention.

Thanks again, I really appreciate it.

 

If I may- let me ask one more question which should be able to be answered quickly.

I am assuming that if you open the capture window and record several clips ( with different names of course) without closing it then the files will remain intact  on the given reel.

However if  you close the window as I did and reopen it again for each show  without changing reels it records over it.

 An analogy would be a "Reel" in Liquid is like a tape in a vcr.

With the capture window open you are recording down the tape with no problems.

But closing the capture window and reopening it would be the same as rewinding the vcr and recording over the the same tape.

 Changing reels each time you open the capture window is the same as putting a different tape in the vcr so you don't record over the one you just used.

 

Hopefully that can be anwsered with a yes or no.

If my understanding is wrong then I can read through the Help files and figure it out.

 

DStone:

This is a common user mistake. When capturing you MUST give a new reel name for each separate piece of media. If you re-use the same reel name, it will overwrite what's on the reel already. It's not the clip name that determines the actual file name used, but the reel name.

 I fell in to this problem long ago. The files are usually intact and you can edit the xml files to fix it, but it really makes you think your losing your mind.

 

DStone:

This is a common user mistake. When capturing you MUST give a new reel name for each separate piece of media. If you re-use the same reel name, it will overwrite what's on the reel already. It's not the clip name that determines the actual file name used, but the reel name.

So if I have one tape, and I capture the first ten minutes using "Tape1" as the reel name, and then don't capture again for a month; and then capture the next ten minutes from the same tape, can I not continue to use "Tape1" reel name? I'm sure I've been doing that - at least I think I'm sure .... I thought it appended a time code to identify the different files.

Hi Guy,

I think that's where the problem lies. In the timecode. If you are going back & capturing the very same tape as "tape 1" & beginning from where you left off the last time you captured from that tape, then the time code will just continue from where you last captured the footage.

If however, you were to capture to the same reel named "tape 1" with a different tape, & went over the same timecode, then you would find that you would end up overwriting some of the files.

 Regards,

Bryce

That summary is correct.

Basically what you need to do is to assign a unique name (the reel name) for each tape. You can then capture the first 10 minutes from that tape, and a month later capture the next 10 minutes from that tape, and everything works as expected. 

Liquid uses the reel name as part of the directory name for where it stores the files. The clip-in and clip-out is used as part of the file name. So here's what happens when you don't change reel names:

From Tape 1 you capture the first 10 minutes (00:00 - 09:29). This plays back as expected.

From Tape 2 you capture 10 minutes start at 30 minutes is (30:00 - 39:29). This plays back as expected.

So far everything works like you want. The clips from both tape 1 and tape 2 play back correctly.

Now, from Tape 3 you capture the first 1 hour (00:00 - 59:29). This plays back as expected. BUT, the clip from tape 1 now plays back the first 10 minutes from tape 3, and the clip from tape 2 plays back 10 minutes from tape 3 starting 30 minutes in. When you have multiple overlapping timecodes, Liquid relinks the existing media pointers. I'm not sure how it decides to relink (it may be that it always relinks the older pointers, or that it relinks to minimize the number of media files, or some other mechansim for optimizing).

Hope this helps.

So I did have it right - thanks for the refresher Dave. Presumably you good also run into trouble iwth broken time codes, although the odds of picking identical in and out points for two different clips on a tape with a broken time code are extreme to put if mildly.

I know that one of the DVD based tutorials (could have been Adita, but I think it was Paul Mitton's) had an extremely good section describing how Liquid handles media storage and clip naming. But it's been a while since I watched it - should go back and remind myself again. Liquid's media management is in fact very powerful and well organized from a machine point of view. Its problem is that its naming conventioins are definitely not user friendly!