I recently had to do a multicam edit of 3 cameras all of which were SONY EX1's.  The footage was amazing but boy was it a pain to do a multicam edit with Liquid.  Liquid likes to trim the extra material at the front and end of a multicam edit.  Since the EX1 splits the video it shoots into 4 GB chunks this means I would have to sync up each section and try to figure out how many frames of overlap were cut off at the ends.  Talk about a major pain.

It is really too bad Liquid can't do a multicam sync of sequences.  That way I could line up all the segments in a sequence and then the multicam edit tool would think of it as a single clip.

So far the only decent solution I came up with was to line up the segments and fuse them out to a new file for each camera and then use that to edit with.  Sure seems like a lot of work. 

Has anybody else experienced this headache with EX1 material in Liquid and how did you deal with it?  Maybe we can all come up with a better work flow for this situation.  So far everything else in Liquid works great for me with the EX1.  It is just the multicam that is a pain.

 

Note:  This is going to be the case for any non tape based medium that caps the files sizes at 4GB per file.

I don't know the EX1 so I may be way out to lunch here - but it seems odd to me that you can bring in a full 12 GB file from much less significant cameras than an EX1. I would be looking at the settings in the EX1 as a first step, see if there is a way to get around this limit. However, it is probably a memory sizeé32-bit addressing limit. There may be some windows utilities that would allow you to join the files together before you use them in liquid.

Other wise I would have suggested stringing the files together on a sequence, fusing out and reimporting - but you have already thought of that! It`s more work than nothing, but if they were shot contiguously you then only have to sync the three full-length files together.

Added later: The limitaton applies to Fat32 file systems. If your machine is using NTFS, then you might want to try the following:

1. Locate all the files from one tape - eg File1 File2 File3 - copy them somewhere easy to work with so if it all goes wrong you haven`t lost the originals.
2. Open a DOS command window make the new location the default directory
3. Type copy File1+File2+File3 NewFile

Close the command window, then import the NewFile into Liquid and see if it works. Of course, you are going to have to do this for the audio files if they are separate from the video. If all this works, then it proves it can be done; I would then be looking for a utility to make the join process a lot easier!

Smetvid,

Not sure this applies but  Mpeg Streamclip can take the individual files Mpeg2 and make 1 bigger clip out of them. I use a Citydisc hard drive and it uses a fat 32 file system to record with. The Liquid dose not  like the HDV files from the citydisc but using the Mpeg Streamclip fixes everything makes 1 big clip and I am able to us it with Multicam inLiquid. Not sue if it works with all Mpeg2 files but it is free and might be worth a try.  I have a JVC HD7 as well it does the same thing instead of fusing in Liquid I use Mpeg Streamclip to create the larger clip as it is MUCH faster........Edd

Hey thanks for the info guys.  I will check them out.  I have been working on a way of adding that feature to my next piece of free software but so far no luck.  I will figure it out even if it kills me.  In the mean time I will try Mpeg Streamclip to get this project finished.

Oh yeah one problem though.  The files from the EX1 are mp4 files and the Sony Clip Browser rewraps them into MXF files.  No way of using he above tools with those formats.  I am going to keep working on my own solution for now.  Of course I could demux the video from Liquid as raw m2v files and then try to combine them but again that seems like a lot of steps.

In case anybody wants to know I am making a Liquid friendly replacement for the SONY Clip Browser.  This one is free and it evens allows you to upconvert to 4:2:2 mpeg2 without having to buy the over priced SONY/ Main Concept plugin.

The EX1 uses MPEG-4??? Are you sure about that Thomas? I thought it shot long-GOP MPEG-2 @ 35 mbps - what other formats does that camera shoot?

The video inside the file is mpeg2 but its put into a mpeg4 wrapper.

Smetvid:

Hey thanks for the info guys.  I will check them out.  I have been working on a way of adding that feature to my next piece of free software but so far no luck.  I will figure it out even if it kills me.  In the mean time I will try Mpeg Streamclip to get this project finished.

Oh yeah one problem though.  The files from the EX1 are mp4 files and the Sony Clip Browser rewraps them into MXF files.  No way of using he above tools with those formats.  I am going to keep working on my own solution for now.  Of course I could demux the video from Liquid as raw m2v files and then try to combine them but again that seems like a lot of steps.

In case anybody wants to know I am making a Liquid friendly replacement for the SONY Clip Browser.  This one is free and it evens allows you to upconvert to 4:2:2 mpeg2 without having to buy the over priced SONY/ Main Concept plugin.

Have you tried using FFMPEG? I've had some success with it on the EX1 files.

Yes I use FFMPEG all the time and never use the clip browser but there is no way to join m2v files once they are stripped from the mp4 wrapper.  I have tried many methods now and the only real method that has worked was to join them in Avisynth and then encode to a new m2v file.  This is less then idea because it takes a long time and it introduces a generation loss.

I have also come to the conclusion that joining the files just isn't a very good idea.  It is best to be able to work with the chunks they way they were in case one ever needs to go back to the raw data from the cards and make use of the metadata.  If we joined the files all the metadata from the cards would be worthless.  Now this may not be a big deal to some people but to me it is.

The fact is multicam editing in Liquid should have been designed to deal with chunks of video and not be limited to a single solid stream.

My very first program I ever designed was a multicam editing tool before Liquid 6 added it.  This program was almost finished when Liquid 6 came out but I had to scrap it since Liquid now had multicam built in.  I am thinking maybe I should raise it from the dead and work on it again.  In this program you could multicam edit multiple chunks and it also would not cut off the extra heads and tails of video and it would work with all the audio tracks.  At one point I was even working on a way to make it more like a switcher where you could dissolve between cameras as you went through.  The dissolve part could work for DV material but I'm not sure if it would have ever worked very well for HDV based material.  There may be a use for this thing after all.