Help with joining several hundred MPG clips for easy DVD authoring

Have you ever had to deal with these new camcorders that record to SD cards or internal flash drives? The files you get from them are MPEG-2 files (actual muxed .MPG files that are named .MOD), I rename the files to .MPG and I'm somewhat ready to go.

What I have to do to get them in DVDSP is to demux them to M2V and AC3 files.

The problem is when I have several hundred or nearly a thousand of these MPG clips (new clips are created every time the record button is pressed), I have to drag each M2V and AC3 to the timeline in DVDSP, which is extremely time consuming and irritating.

I'm wondering if anyone knows of a way to join the MPG files (preferably before demuxing) so I can get it into one big clip to drop into DVDSP. Or if there's a better way to deal with all these clips, I don't know.

Thanks!
Casey

I've already tried searching the internet, but all I get is advertising and links to $25 shareware programs that are for PC that also re-encode all the footage.

You can use MPEG Streamclip to convert the media, but you're going to have assemble the clips somewhere like in FCP.

That's what I ended up doing this time...I did a batch encode overnight, and it's going to work.

The thing is, I don't like having to go from MPG2 to ProRes and back to MPG2 again. If it's already in MPG2 format, I'd prefer not to have to go back and forth this way.

Thanks!
Casey

> You can use MPEG Streamclip to convert the media, but you're going to have assemble the clips
> somewhere like in FCP.

Actually, Tom, MPEG Streamclip has a "Join All the Files" option when you put more than one clip into the Batch List window.


www.derekmok.com

Actually, Derek, I tried that last time, and I had an audio drift issue...it was pretty close for the first 10-15 minutes, but after 45-60 minutes, it was off by at least 30 seconds. Is there a setting that I had wrong, possibly?

The choices are "Join all the files", "Fix Timecode Breaks", and under that "Do not skip any frame".

What is "Fix timecode breaks" anyways...I always do it and it tends to find say 100 breaks, even if the footage is a non-stop single shot for 2 hours?

I still have the footage from the last project on the hard drive...maybe if I get some spare time, I can experiment a little bit more. I'm pretty sure I did have all three of those options checked when I did it before, though.

Thanks!
Casey