Sony users! How do I bypass PMB?
 

This is the most annoying problem I've ever had, so PMB wasn't reading my camera earlier, so I tried to install later/earlier version to upgrade but I couldnt because I need the disc on me and the disc is at my parents house two hours away (And I only got a quarter tank) so I gave it a different approach and bought a new USB cable so now the media checker can finally read my camera but the version of PMB I ended up with is too outdated to upload my videos onto it and so I'm stuck with 45 minutes of rough footage I can not edit unless I can find a way to bypass pmb and get to the videos myself but I would have no idea where to start does anyone know how?

Depending on what version of PMB you've got, you may be able to do an update from Sony's site - I think they posted 5.3 and it'll update anything back to v. 4, IIRC. Worth looking into.

PMB was really particular until last year, when they opened it up quite a bit - which was nice, the PMB version covered ALL the 2010 cameras, instead of requiring a different version for each camera... the latest version is reasonably backward compatible from what I could tell - I've got a mix of Sony cameras spanning several years, and all seem to be recognized with the latest version.

Bypass? Isn't that just called plugging the USB cable in?
 

"Bypassing PMB" is interesting to me, as it suggests that there is such a thing as a camera that requires PMB. Is that the case? I own both an HDR-CX12 and an HXR-NX5U, both of which came with PMB, yet it has never occurred to me to even install the program. In both cases, I plug the camera into the USB cable, drag the video clips off, format the card, then go off to the next shoot. Should I *not* bypass PMB? ;-)

Best,
Aaron

It's not a big deal- you can do it either way.
If I have shot a lot of clips over a period of time (days/weeks), I will use PMB because it imports the clip metadata, and the clip names include the date. I find it can be useful useful in sorting things out for editing.
But, there are no quality issues- it's the same file no matter how you import it

The other advantage in using the Sony utility is if like me you shoot long programs that are longer than a FAT 32 file the software transfers the files as clips to the computer not the FAT 32 files on the cards, with the meta data associated with the clip not the files. So as in my case a theatre show of two 1 hour acts will transfer as two clips. Not potentially 5, 6 or more files. The clip ID's will be the start times of the Acts of the play.

For family shoots with my XR500 using the PMB logs all the clips with meta data and can display by directory ( the time I transferred to the PC) or by calendar making it easy to find what I want. I never transfer any other way.

Ron Evans

Edit: I have SR11, XR500 and NX5U.

If you don't shoot long clips (over the 2G file size), it's no big deal, as PMB auto-stitches longer clips together. For me that's a critical function.

I also like that it organizes all the video and stills fairly effectively. It also will do facial recognition and has other organizing features, which may or may not be of interest.

Edit: Aw gee, I see Ron was writing the same thing at the same time! Well, there ya have it, in case you were wondering!

Is PMB able to auto-stitch files from other manufacturers, or just from Sony models?

If just Sony, what are users of other manufacturers models using to do the auto-stitching?

I dug out my PMB disc and installed it just for kicks. It wanted to talk to a Sony camcorder before it would talk to me, so my guess is that using it with footage from other cams won't work unless the auto-stitching can be done after the files are already on your drive. I haven't looked into that. If that's the case, then perhaps any old .m2ts file would work.

If you're on Windows, there are a number of inexpensive NLEs that can losslessly stitch AVCHD clips together. Corel VideoStudio is one example. I've had very good luck using it with 1080i60 footage from multiple cameras, but 720p60 from the NX5 can yield some glitchy transitions (duplicated frames). NeroVision also works. ...but for $0? Not sure.

I'd presume it's Sony proprietary, as it "recognizes" the camera on connection. I would expect that the other manufacturers have their own software to autostitch long files, and there was someone here who put together a little program to do it, do a search of DVi and you should find it.

Aaron - while older versions of PMB were "tied" to the camera, so you have to have the correct PMB version for the specific camera, the latest version (2010, v 5.x) is a bit more camera agnostic within the Sony line (finally!!).

It was a major pain having to install each PMB version if you had multiple Sony models... now when you plug a "new" camera in, it recognizes it, and installs the appropriate features, no CD required, big improvement in "user friendliness".