Submitted by rodkar on Sat, 05/09/2009 - 01:19
i just started to consolidate and organize avchd folders that i have copied from my canon hf11 to my external hard disks. i want to use flamingo to reference to external events. right now, i store each "disc" under a folder i created in a year-chronological reel number format. but when i use flamingo to "import", it has to go deep into the STREAM folder to find the footage and result it STREAM being the folder referenced - which is the same for every "disc". I try to preserve the file structure as intact as possible, although i have no idea why I am trying to do this. Somehow, I just wanna preserve it in case I need to transfer them for playback on other devices. I guess I can just rename each STREAM folder under like 2009-XXX parent folder to the same name as 2009-XXX. In that case, I can always rename them to STREAM if needed. I just wanna know if there is any overwhelming reason not to just delete all the PLAYLIST, BACKUP, CLIPINF, blah blah blah folders and files created by the camcorder and just store the files under STREAM. I know they are need for playback on like blu-ray players. But other than that, any other reasons to keep them? I mean, if blu-ray authoring is supported natively on mac, we can always create blu-ray discs like we used to create dvd videos, right? we only need the video files and let the authoring program to deal with the file structure that needs to be created for players to recognize ...
Rod
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AVCHD file structure
Hi Rod,
there is no need to preserve the AVCHD support files when using FlamingoHD. They are needed when playing back a movie on a Blu-ray player, and thats about it.
By using RevolverHD in conjunction with FlamingoHD, you can create valid AVCHD disk images or AVCHD DVDs for Blu-ray playback. In this case, we create all the support files required to make the playback work, so the old files are redundant.
As a hint, once you have your folders renamed, you can just do a Batch Import for the whole area and FlamingoHD will create an event per folder that it finds containing valid content (i.e. movies, images or audio).
thanks for your response
one more thing (before I go ahead to get rid of those garbage files), where are metadata stored? (like date and time taken, etc. that are shown on the camcorder when played back) inside the video files itself or hidden inside those folders and files?
AVCHD meta files
Hi Rod,
good question. The AVCHD files store all metadata internally except date/time taken, which is in the playlist.
FlamingoHD does not (yet) read metadata files when importing, because the timestamp on the file gives the date/time taken.
When you copy clips from the camera to you harddrive, sometimes the timestamp on the file gets set to the date/time of the transfer.
Before you delete the AVCHD support files, check the timestamps on the MTS files. If these seem right, then you're OK.
If not, its a bit of a hassle. FlamingoHD will do the import, but it will set the time taken to the filesystem date. You can edit this attribute in FlamingoHD to fix things up, but thats just a work-around until we make FlamingoHD read the metadata itself on import.
Regards
Justin
about duplicating filmstrips and a few others
i must confess i didn't know the filmstrips view exists until i finished referencing 18 disk images yesterday. maybe it's because a view menu is missing in the toolbar. in fact, i thought there was a bug when i tried to quit the program and it prompted me that building up filmstrips still undergoing. it took about half a day to finish the generation. and the wait was worth it. it makes the program much more useful. maybe you should consider making a view menu in future release. but maybe it was just me.
i therefore must write to ask you if it is possible to duplicate (like copying the necessary files or if exporting is hidden somewhere) the whole library on another machine as I work on both a macbook and a macbook pro.
another observation, i have labeled my folders in the external drive in the format of 2009-XXX like 2009-001 to 2009-018. while they sort in the logical way in finder, they are not sorted in chronological order when i created event libraries.
lastly, it seems the program tries to find devices (in my case, hard drives and iphone) everytime it starts up. and sometimes, it took a bit too long and the program stopped responding and i had to force quit it. can this automatic scanning be turned off?
despite the above, i think you have a great product and your support is top notch.
FlamingoHD libraries
Hi Rod,
we will be re-organising the FlamingoHD toolbar in the v1.3 release when we add in Search. This will involve moving the Poster/Filmstrip view selector to the top toolbar, and using new (i.e. more obvious) icons. You're not the first to notice this, so its not you ;)
The entire FlamingoHD library can be moved to a new location, then Preferences can be updated to use that library at the new location.
Event are currently sorted according to the date of the earliest content item in each Event. We don't take any notice of the Event title at this stage. We will soon be doing some work on the Event treeview, so will look at providing some options for the Event sort order at this stage.
We will have a look at the start-up process when multiple devices are available. We have tuned this once before, but it may need some more attention now that we handle USB devices such as iPhones, cameras, etc.
Thanks for the feedback!
thanks justin, you have been most helpful!
i will keep the support files for the time being and just rename the STREAM folders until an update is released.
thanks a lot for your really helpful responses.
Automator workflow to accomplish this task
I created an automator workflow which uses "Exiftool" to rename the MTS files based on the original capture date stored within the MTS file's EXIF data. Maybe this would help you, too?
The items in CAPS are the actions you can drag and drop from within the Automator program. Here are two separate files, depending on if you want to rename MTS, MOV, or AVI files. You can't hurt your file by running the wrong script--it just won't do anything if you don't run the appropriate script. Reason is that the EXIF name for the creation date is slightly different depending on what type of file. You can download the scripts using the links. Just drag and drop the files you wish to rename onto the script icon...
Automator workflow:
===================================
GET SELECTED ITEMS
ASK FOR CONFIRMATION
"Permission to proceed, Sir/Ma'am?"
"Do you wish to rename the dragged-and-dropped files based on the original capture date?"
RUN SHELL SCRIPT
Shell: /bin/bash
Pass input: as arguments
for x in "$@"
do
exiftool '-FileName
========================
Rename MTS & AVI files using dates
Rename MOV files using dates
Automator workflow problem
There is no GET SELECTED ITEMS action in the actions library, should I replace this with GET SPECIFIED MOVIES?
The exiftool command is reported as 'not found(127)'
OX Snow Leopard.
Have never tried Automator nor tried scripts before so maybe I am missing something here