I have traditionally used a DV tape camera, so when I capture the DV in from the camera, I can then do scene detection based on the date/time stamp. I would then be able to combine scenes for a common day together, making the editing very easy and can immediately create a DVD from it. Now I have switched to a HDD camera - a Panasonic SDR-H200. This camera captures the scenes into separate files.
When importing these files into pinnacle Ultimate V11 (all patches applied), I am having a couple of issues. First, pinnacle wants to put all of the imported files in the same directory, but calls them the same base file name that is on the camera. The problem is that the camera keeps separate directories for each day (/PRG00A/MOV001.MOD - MOV004.MOD for 4 scenes on that day), (/PRG00B/MOV001.MOD - MOV00E, MOV010.MOD - MOV016.MOD for 22 scenes). So when importing all of the scenes, pinnacle want to overwrite MOV001 from one day with MOV001 from the next. I then tried using the rename files option on import, where I would set the base name to the date (07042008_ or 07102008_, etc) , and only import the files for a day at a time. The problem with this is that when I select the renaming option, the files fail to import at all - not sure why. I just know that if I have that checkbox selected, no files get imported at all. So then, I resorted to creating a separate directory for each day and then importing the files into just that directory for that day. That worked enough to get the files imported, but when editing, the files are listed out of sequence because it does not seem to understand the naming logic that the camera has, and is not looking at the creation date/time on the files either. So the scenes show up with MOV00A.MOD - MOV00E.MOD followed by MOV001.MOD - MOV016.MOD, instead of in hexadecimal sequence of MOV001 - MOV00E, then MOV010 - MOV016. Additionally, in edit mode, I cannot see the create date/timestamp, so I would have to figure out the order when adding it to the project.
Also, I would like to combine many of the start/stop scenes together into one scene. It seems that I cannot select multiple files and do a combine scenes to be able to add them to the project as just one big combined scene.
Has anyone found these same issues, and how have you overcome them? Also, is any of this corrected in Studio 12? I have been a loyal Pinnacle studio user since v7, and have gone through many problems/fixes for Studio, so it could well be that this all goes away with v12 - but I don't want to spend $100 for the upgrade and find out that I am still having these quirks.
It seems that just having the file rename function working might fix it, but I'm not sure what order it would import the video in. It would either have to do it in timestamp order, or know how the panasonic names it's files.
Thanks,
Kelly O.