EOS FCP plugin shortening clips
 

I received about 3 hours of 5D footage over the weekend. The footage was complete and in the correct folder structure. I used the EOS plugin in FCP6 (I know not supported) to import all of the footage. I then noticed that some clips were shortened drastically ( a 3min clip was now 1min). I never set ins and outs in the Log and Transfer window. Also, some clips were renamed. Has anyone else experienced this?
Oddly enough, T2i footage seems to import fine.

I've got a T2i (with FCP7) and have seen this happen quite a few times.

I've not yet seen it happen if I set in and out points.

Have experienced this with all kinds of media so I don't think it's the EOS plugin. I think it's a problem with Log and Transfer. Usually you find that there is a warning icon for clips that don't import properly.

I found it happened mostly on really large or spanned clips (P2) and also when I was editing at the same time as FCP was ingesting. The other factor was sometimes a naming double up, but usually if I left the computer alone when importing I had no problems.

But really the most important thing to do is make sure you still have your original files before you go deleting stuff. That's why I always transfer the raw files to disk first and then import from there.

That way if you miss the fact that a clips is suddenly much shorter than it should be you can re-import.

I've also noticed this truncation several times. I don't think it has anything to do with the computer being busy or the size of the clip. It happens when the machine is doing nothing else, on all sizes of clips.

So after converting to ProRes, I line up the original and the converted clips in two browser windows in Final Cut and eyeball for differences. It's a real pain, due to the large number of clips we shoot at each event.

(It's part of the magic of Apple that the free utility MPEG Streamclip is both faster and more reliable at transcoding. Of course it does not allow log and transfer and does not generate timecode as does the plugin. And supposedly Compressor creates "higher quality" ProRes clips.)

Does anyone know of a utility of some type that can compare the lengths of clips and automatically find discrepancies of this kind?

This information was worth the price of admission to the forum today.

Erik, have you found a such a utility?

Erik, the idea of comparing media lengths gets defeated if you've edited in and out points, shortening the length of the output media when compared with the original camera media.

I made a quick screencast about this problem today, and also the strange way that the EOS plugin renames re-imported clips.

Canon EOS Movie Plugin-E1 errors

This is a common problem using E1 plug in - quite a few boards / blogs have picked up on it. I'm not sure if everyone experiences it, but it's been a major hassle for me.

While it can also happen when you leave your mac alone to transcode, it's much much more common (for me it happens to around 80% of clips) when the system is busy doing other tasks while E1 is at work. It truncates quite randomly (sometimes a few seconds into a clip, sometimes right near the end), and gives no indication that it has done so - you must manually check the duration of all transcoded files as Erik says - it's a real pain.

Now I leave my mac alone overnight to transcode, and I transcode entire clips (not using in and out points in E1) and that seems to solve the problem; at the same time the software has become a lot less useful. In fact I'm thinking of switching back to mpeg streamclip and ditching the E1 plug in until this is resolved.

Josh