Question about continuous recording with SR11
 

I recently recorded an hour and a half concert with my SR11. When I got home I found out that, when downloaded onto my computer with Picture Motion Browser, it subdivided my footage into segments of 12-15 minutes or so. When I put all the segments together on a DVD showing the complete concert, there were small interruptions in both the picture and sound where those segments were seperated.
How can one get around this? Is there something I can do next time to avoid this problem?

Thanks.
Mike

Has this just happened. I regularly record over 1hour and 30 mins on both my SR11 and XR500 and just get one clip. Did PMB see one clip or many clips?

Ron Evans

This all happened yesterday. I ended up with six seperate clips over the 1.5 hour concert.

Mike

I could be way off the mark on this- but, I seem to recall that both the drive and card formatting is FAT 32 which has a 2 GB limit. Thus, 1.5 hr = about 12GB = six 2GB clips.
I thought the PMB software is supposed to stitch these together on transfer, to give you a single continuous clip (If transferring to an NTFS formatted drive).
The Sony EX1 does this when it moves from card slot #1 to #2 on a continuous shot. It obviously breaks the clip, but reassembles it on transfer to computer.
Maybe take a look at the PMB settings a little closer & see if the answer lies there.

To echo an earlier post, I have recorded single clip soccer games of almost 2 hours in length multiple times. PMB takes any "under the covers" individual files where the 2 GB limit was imposed and stitches them back together into one huge file if your hard drive accepts that (64 bit Vista and an NTFS-formatted drive will). The file sizes I saw ranged from 12 to 14 GB.

Most video capture software I've tried has an option for having the capture automatically try to detect scenes. Maybe PMB was set to do that or something similar by default and created separate files. Or if your target hardware itself (the drive and/or operating system) imposes that 2 GB file limit, that might have made PMB split the long clip into pieces as well.

The 14 GB files I mentioned above can't be copied to my 250 GB USB drive which uses FAT directories, for example. They work fine on the 250 GB internal drive with NTFS formatting.

Stitches things back together? So how do I get them back to just one continuous program on my hard drive?

Mike

Mike -
If you have the PMB software, use that to import the clips from the camera - the Sony software stitches the shorter sections back together on import. That's the EASY way...

If you already deleted the clips from the camera, do a search on DVi - there was a little program someone put together to stitch the files together, since there were some problems with Canons implementation, and it might be able to re-attach your pieces.

One of the quirks of AVCHD is that it chops the files up (as you've already noted, between 12-17 minutes in length depending on bitrate and complexity of scene, but all about 2G in file size). There are "housekeeping" files kept in the other folders on the drive that apparently have the details needed to reassemble things upon import, and you've got to be careful about either using PMB or knowing to keep file/folder structures intact.

Thanks to all who have given their knowledgable advice. It is well appreciated.
What I did, was to import the videos from my SR11 into PMB, and then captured them to Pinnacle 12. When I started working with those seperate clips in Pinnacle, thats when I noticed the gaps between the clips. Very frustrating.

So, taking the clips from PMB and then going where with them?

Mike

PS Sorry for the brain freeze-up....a result of thirty years teaching junior high school.

Not sure about Pinnacle, but I just drag the clips from PMB right onto my Vegas timeline. Once they have been imported and PMB stitched them together, they should be all one piece on your computer Hard disk - no need to recapture.

Mike. Did the clips appear on the SR11 or was it one clip on the SR11 LCD? It should always appear as one clip on the SR11 LCD or there really are separate clips. Sony PMB will see what the SR11 resolves the clip to be, one or many, regardless of FAT 32 and will construct on the PC in that format depending on hard drive formatting. In PMB let the software decide what to import( on the first screen that comes up when camera is connected and let it import, it keeps a log of what it has transfered). Don't do the normal windows explorer file selection or you will get individual FAT32 files.

Ron Evans

On the SR11, it was one clip.

Mike

Mike if it was one clip on the SR11 LCD PMB should also have seen it as one clip and it should have been transfered as one clip. I would try it again if you haven't deleted it yet. There are two ways of getting PMB to transfer. The automatic way where it remembers what it transferred and "import" where it will show all clips on the camera and you can pick which clips and also define where they will go on the PC. I use "import" projects and send to a working location. Locations need to be set each time if you change them.

Ron Evans

Thanks Ken. I will try downloading the video again to PMB and see what happens. Will do this either on Monday or Tuesday (my next opportunity to have the time). And then I'll capture it again with Pinnacle and see if I get a different result.

Mike

Drive File Structure
 

Mike,
As it was pointed out in a previous post, if the hard drive you are capturing to is a FAT 32 formatted drive, you are limited to 2GB per clip.
I have the same camera, but use a MAC and the hard drives are re-formated. The ones that were FAT 32 form the factory did just as you describe. Once they were reformatted, the clips were intact.
Tom

Thanks. I will look into that.

Mike