xa 10 AVCHD files are divided causes problems.

[Tuy Le]

using one camera, you won't notice the drop frames, but with multicam you will see the drop frame in between the files !

Originally Posted by Buba Kastorski

this is interesting,
because I don't have any problem with long files from my HF G10, it does start new file every 2 Gb, this is a FAT file system limitation not the camcorder, but I don't have a single frame dropped in between the files;
although my G10 is one of the first ones and straight from Japan, but i don't think it makes any difference.

[Don Palomaki]

In my experience you can notice the "dropped" frame in some shots as a jump in motion and audio. Whether or not you notice it does depend on the video content (motion and sound).

I suspect the frame is dropped because the the continuation files lack some of the header found in the first file, and that expected header portion of the file may be ignore by some NLE software resulting on a lost frame or so of data.

Binary concatination of the continuation files to the base file eleminates this issue; e.g, using the DOS COPY command with the /B switch.

[Joe Kollee]

Thanks for the tip Don. The dos command works perfectly.

For those who do not want to look it up it works like this:

copy /b 00001.mts+00002.mts+00003.mts+00004.mts merged.mts

In this case, 1,2 and 3 are 2gb files. ( mine show up as 1,998,708 kb) and the 4th file will be less than the first three files, meaning you pressed stop record.

After the 4th file you need to type a name for the new file to be created too. In this case, I called it merged.mts, you can call it anything you want. If you forget to add the new name after the last file, what will happen is, 2,3,and 4 will be merged onto 1. So you will now have a 00001.mts file that has the other three files added to it.

You will not have any pausing or dropping of two frames between each of the MTS files this way as it will be one new 6gb+ file.

Canons solution as well as many other manufactures, is to use their software that came with the camera, connect the camera to the PC/MAC and use the joining software on the fly to import it to the system. I prefer to use USB 3.0 and transfer the cards individually and now with Dons dos command this solves the problem nicely.

[Buba Kastorski]

Originally Posted by Tuy Le

using one camera, you won't notice the drop frames, but with multicam you will see the drop frame in between the files !

I'm sorry, i do not understand hows one camera is different from multicam shot, in terms of dropped frames?

[Mike Costantini]

This concerns me, I just got the XA10 and will be using it with a miniDV camera. Then I'll need to sync the footage from these two cameras in post production. If there's frames dropped, this could be problematic since the miniDV camera will record a full 60 mins of tape with no dropped frames........?

[Eric Olson]

Originally Posted by Mike Costantini

This concerns me, I just got the XA10 and will be using it with a miniDV camera. Then I'll need to sync the footage from these two cameras in post production. If there's frames dropped, this could be problematic since the miniDV camera will record a full 60 mins of tape with no dropped frames........?

A long video clip on the XA10 will consist of multiple files 2GB in length that need to be joined back together before editing. All AVCHD camcorders split the video in this way. There are many utilities that will join the files back together to restore the original clip without dropping any frames. If you have dropped frames, then you are doing it wrong. As mentioned above, the DOS/Windows command

copy /b 00001.mts + 00002.mts + 00003.mts + 00004.mts joined.mts

will join the pieces back together. No frames will be lost provided you join the right pieces together.

[Jason Garrett]

Never seen this; I import with the supplied Canon software and it doesn’t stitch them together or I haven’t been letting it if it does. I import them into Premiere and drop them on the timeline and they never miss a beat from what I can tell so far.