Hi from new user; + spanned clips & GPS extraction questions

[Krystian Jones]

Hello team, long time reader, first time poster.

I found this forum a very useful resource when considering what camera to buy for my company. We upgraded from my long serving PD150 so I was already sold on Sony, and I eventually decided to buy the NX5 because of it's good value and streamlined design towards the corporate/events work that we usually get.
I signed up to contribute here on the day I ordered my camera, and very much wanted to be able to post here as upon the arrival of my camera it appeared I was one of the first people in Europe to be told about and run the home firmware update. Unfortunately I was unable to post because of the fact it took the moderators here nearly a month to authorise and confirm my account!
In disgust at having to wait so long, I lost interest and got to work using my lovely new NX5, but now I am back and hoping to finally get involved with the community of fellow owners.

In particular I have two questions that perhaps others can help me with.

1) Firstly one about clips that have spanned over memory cards;
I have been as careful as I can to avoid clips that I am shooting being spanned over two cards when one card fills up in the middle of a take. I vaguely remembered reading somewhere that FCP's Log and Transfer (of which I am a user) had problems when importing spanned clips.
This week an interview I was filming ended up running way longer than anticipated and I ended up with 38mins on one card and 2mins on another. The break in the clip where it changed between cards was in the middle of an important sentence. I imported into FCP using L&T and placed the the clips into a timeline together to assess the damage; the video was perfect, the last frame of clip from card 1 run strait into the first frame from card 2. BUT when it came to audio there was a problem; the last ~12 frames of sound from clip 1 is missing. Clip 2 picks up just fine, but there is a noticeable gap with a word missing from the end of clip 1.

Q: Does anyone know any way of fixing this problem or reclaiming the lost audio using an all Mac workflow?
I expect I may have to resort to the PC based Content Management Utility in order to reclaim my missing 12 frames of audio, but am I likely I have any compatibility/format issues in doing this (I use an offline workflow editing on space-saving ProRes Proxy then reconnect my final edit to ProRes 422 with Media Manager & Reconnect Media from the original AVCHD archive)?


2) about the ability to extract and generate Google Maps from the NX5's GPS metadata;
It became clear to me early on that the GPS metadata is only accessible via the PC based Content Management Utility, and I am completely Mac based at present. I did some tests with the Utility and thought it prohibitively difficult to extract the metadata and inbed them into Google Maps as you seem to have to copy/paste each clip's GPS info individually.

Q: is anybody able to provide me with a workflow that allows me to easily export the GPS metadata from my NX5 footage (either somehow on a Mac or using my girlfriend's Vista PC) and generate a Google Map with the location and clip name/date+time/duration marked?
The ability to have a thumbnail from the clip on each place marker too is likely to be a wish too far; but if you don't ask, you don't get.


The GPS feature of the camera seemed little more than novelty at first but as I have worked with the camera one situation where it would be very useful has become clear, so I thought I would seek a little more clarification about it before I abandon the idea again.


Thanks for taking the time to read and hopefully reply =)

If there is interest I will post soon with links to my NX5 test footage and with details of the offline edit process that I developed.

[Krystian Jones]

Pending more experienced advice, I found a work around of sorts for the spanned clips audio problem;

Imported both clips using the Sony Content Utility on a PC which auto-merged them together into one file for me. Then I copied the new .m2ts file on to my Mac, opened it with VLC and exported the audio as a .wav.
I then dropped this .wav into a sequence with my two unjoined clips from the original Tog & Transfer import and they lined up just fine. Sound quality is a little different though, but I could use the new .wav to plug the gap or in its entirety for the interview.

If there's a way to get Log & Transfer to recognise the new .m2ts file, or somehow convert it into a ProRes without buying new software I would love to hear about it.

[Colin Browell]

2) about the ability to extract and generate Google Maps from the NX5's GPS metadata;
It became clear to me early on that the GPS metadata is only accessible via the PC based Content Management Utility, and I am completely Mac based at present. I did some tests with the Utility and thought it prohibitively difficult to extract the metadata and inbed them into Google Maps as you seem to have to copy/paste each clip's GPS info individually.

Maybe of little help as you are Mac-only, but you can view a Google map at any position in a clip using DVMP Pro, and also export all of the GPS data for a clip (e.g. if you are in a moving vehicle) to a CSV file. It will also do this if you were recording in standard def MPEG-2. But it runs on a PC only.

http://www.dvmp.co.uk/player.htm#geotagging

[Claire Buckley]

It might be useful (and assuming that the "missing" data is there on the NX5 in the first place) but a recent purchase of a couple of SanDisk Extreme SDHC cards for my newley acquired NX5 brought a couple of vouchers for a free download of a data recovery package called Rescue Pro.

The voucher points to SanDisk Extreme Customers - LC Technology which appear to offer a download for SanDisk data recovery.

It might not help you for this initial issue (and your edit) but might be useful to people for the future.

[Jose Bucaro]

Originally Posted by Krystian Jones

Pending more experienced advice, I found a work around of sorts for the spanned clips audio problem;

Imported both clips using the Sony Content Utility on a PC which auto-merged them together into one file for me. Then I copied the new .m2ts file on to my Mac, opened it with VLC and exported the audio as a .wav.
I then dropped this .wav into a sequence with my two unjoined clips from the original Tog & Transfer import and they lined up just fine. Sound quality is a little different though, but I could use the new .wav to plug the gap or in its entirety for the interview.

If there's a way to get Log & Transfer to recognise the new .m2ts file, or somehow convert it into a ProRes without buying new software I would love to hear about it.

The other way would be to purchase the Intensity Pro card and capture directly to Final Cut Pro via the HDMI port from your camera. Use your camera for playback.

[David Wayne Groves]

You state you have 38 minutes on one card and a little over 3 minutes on the next, why not get a 32Gig SDHC card which will hold nearly 3 1/2 hours, this should handle any extended interview issues, they can be had for about $100 or less....I keep 2 in my AX2000 .....

[Krystian Jones]

Thanks for all the suggestions but still not a definitive answer.

For time time being the solution I worked out seems to be the best, or the data recovery app helpfully suggested by Claire. Have you use this program Claire, is it able to recover media spanned between cards without the drop out of any audio?

It seems bizarre to be that media that clearly exists on the card is able to be 'lost' by FCP's L&T in the transcoding process. I'm very unhappy about this, but just glad to have been able to find a work around for the time being.

David Wayne Groves, you misunderstand; I have 32GB SDHC cards, it's just that one was nearly full and I was not able to switch to the next card manually as I was conducting an interview at the time. Regardless of card size, it is still possible to fill them and thus require automatic transfer of recording to the other card.
Maybe if I were able to invest in a FMU128 (that can record up to 11hrs if I'm not mistaken) then that might have rendered the whole situation impossible, but as of yet I can not afford one because of their typical Sony prohibitive prize tag.

[Colin Browell]

Have you tried a simple binary join of the spanned files? If the packets are simply being continued on the next card which seems likely then (for example) a "COPY" command in the Windows Command Window would join them into a single file with (hopefully!) unbroken video and sound.

copy /b infile1+infile2 outfile

or on a Mac use the "cat" command

cat infile1 infile2 > outfile

[Krystian Jones]

Hi Colin.
Thanks for your suggestion, and appologies for my very late reply!

I have no tried this, and although I understand the basics of your idea (using Terminal right?), it is a little beyond my usual computer abilities on my Mac.

At the moment I just avoid spanning clips across cards and if I forget just use the slightly long-winded method detailed above.

[Ron Evans]

I believe a Mac will read an NTSF hard disc so one way is to use your girlfriends PC and the Content Management utility to get all the files transferred to an external hard drive that you then use on your Mac. There are a lot of advantages to using the utility may even be worth getting a cheap PC laptop to do this.
The utility has a few little quirks ( like the need to create and register a folder to transfer files to for instance) but once you get used to it then it is stable and quick.

I always use it to transfer my files to the PC.

Ron Evans