Canon C300 ingest lesson

I received a hard drive with C300 media folder archived to it from the camera card, I've installed Canon XF Utility AND the FCP7 XF plugin. I invoked the Log and Transfer, checked to make certain the Canon MPEG 2 format shows up in Preferences, transcoding to ProRes422 (SQ). Ready to go. I nav to the shuttle drive containing the media folder.

It doesn't list the clips-- not from any enclosing folder but they DO appear using the XF utility outside of FCP. So I called the cameraman, who as I did only uses the standalone XF utility to assure the client has media.

Cameraman tells me he faces a dilemma every time he archives more than one card to hard drive-- each enveloping folder is called CONTENTS. You can't have more than one such file on the same hard drive level, so he renames it to something describing the contents. Uh-oh.

Addiction/Opiates
CLIPS001
etc

Logical, but heresy, right, Shane?

The CONTENTS folder is the first important part of the Canon folder structure required for ingest. Rename it and FCP burps with its classic "Unsupported Media or Invalid folder structure" message.

I also did not like the slash used in the folder name. FCP translates this in Log and Transfer as

Addiction:Opiates

which may be even worse.

So I suggested he envelope each CONTENTS folder in separate topically named folders, such as--

Addiction-Opiates_01
CONTENTS
CLIPS001
etc

Addiction-Opiates_02
CONTENTS
CLIPS001
etc

and that opens the expected Log and Transfer gateway to each.

I haven't worked with much Canon card media. Any gotchas to this?

- Loren

Today's FCP 7 keytips:
Copy clip Attributes with Command-C
Paste selected Attributes with Option-V
Remove selected Attributes with Command-Option-V !

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Heresy I say!

And that's EXACTLY what you do. This is what you did with P2, that also had a CONTENTS folder. This is what you do with ALL tapeless media. Make a folder and give it a unique REEL name, and then drop the full card contents into that. Never rename anything...let the camera guy know that. Make unique folder names, and then archive the full card into those new folders. That's just about bullet proof.

OR...

They can get Shotput Pro or BulletProof or other offloader and have those do the archiving...as they do it properly, with the file folder creation and everything.


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