jason1025 Posted April 27, 2011 Share Posted April 27, 2011 Hi Folks I have an issue. I have a device which captures video but it forces me to format the drive fat32 which means it segments the clips into approximately 4 gig chunks. To edit the footage I need to copy all the chunks to my editing drive from the capture device hard drive. I was wondering if anyone knows of a way / script or program / automator that will concatenate the segments durning the copy? And preferably on a mac. I was looking on line and I cant find anything. I was hoping there was a unix command that would copy and concatenate at the same time. There might be but I cant find it. Quicktime player will allow you do join .mov files but the process is very manual and time consuming. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
itsjustme Posted April 27, 2011 Share Posted April 27, 2011 How about Split&Concat? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hash Fellow robcat2075 Posted April 28, 2011 Hash Fellow Share Posted April 28, 2011 I think combining video is a bit more complicated than combining text files. Why does the editing program even need them combined? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jason1025 Posted April 28, 2011 Author Share Posted April 28, 2011 How about Split&Concat? Thanks for the link. I cant get it to work, every file it makes that is concatenated is about 4k in size. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jason1025 Posted April 28, 2011 Author Share Posted April 28, 2011 I think combining video is a bit more complicated than combining text files. Why does the editing program even need them combined? Its not practical to work with segmented files. 1. Exponentially more time consuming when sinking external audio from a separate source from a sound guy. Not practical for specifics to editing. 2. Not practical when adding effects 3. trying to do global effects or time ramps not practical. 4. annoying to have 100 or more extra files for what should be 1 file. Makes things harder to read in the project. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hash Fellow robcat2075 Posted April 28, 2011 Hash Fellow Share Posted April 28, 2011 If I had a situation where I had several video files that needed to be treated as one and i were editing this in something like After Effects i'd make one "composition" that strung all the files together in order, and then use that as a single piece of footage in the composition where I was dong my real editing. In Aftereffects such sub-compositions are passed through without loss of quality since they don't' need to be prerendered to show inthe composition they are inserted in. But I've never had 100 files that needed to be treated in such a way. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Admin Rodney Posted April 28, 2011 Admin Share Posted April 28, 2011 Video capture devices are cheap enough these days that finding one that will allow you to format your drive other than FAT32 might save you a great deal of trouble. You requirement to stay within FAT32 seems to be the root of the problem. Perhaps the company will allow a trade in/upgrade to their product? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
itsjustme Posted April 28, 2011 Share Posted April 28, 2011 How about this? I know on a PC you can use something like Winzip to compress a large file into several smaller files then uncompress them back into a single file...I'm not sure if you would have to pay for Winzip on the Mac though (there is a shareware version for PC). Hope that helps. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fuchur Posted April 28, 2011 Share Posted April 28, 2011 I think combining video is a bit more complicated than combining text files. Why does the editing program even need them combined? Its not practical to work with segmented files. 1. Exponentially more time consuming when sinking external audio from a separate source from a sound guy. Not practical for specifics to editing. 2. Not practical when adding effects 3. trying to do global effects or time ramps not practical. 4. annoying to have 100 or more extra files for what should be 1 file. Makes things harder to read in the project. I think premiere and vegas (sorry I am on a windows-pc) can create a group from many different video-files which should be manipulateable as any single asset. It is still annoying to import as many files, but it is the best I can think of, OR you just import and render them out after that to one file and use that for editiing. See you *Fuchur* Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jason1025 Posted April 28, 2011 Author Share Posted April 28, 2011 If I had a situation where I had several video files that needed to be treated as one and i were editing this in something like After Effects i'd make one "composition" that strung all the files together in order, and then use that as a single piece of footage in the composition where I was dong my real editing. In Aftereffects such sub-compositions are passed through without loss of quality since they don't' need to be prerendered to show inthe composition they are inserted in. But I've never had 100 files that needed to be treated in such a way. That is a viable work around but most people do not use ae to edit, because it is very slow at that and not designed for it. To render out the strung together files is not an option either because at that point you have gained nothing by capturing the files on set. FCP has the ability to precomp as well, its sometimes referred to as nesting where you load files into a sequence and then edit the sequence as if it were a source file the sequence just references the original clips and pretends to be them. Unfortunately its not advised because of buggs that have never been fully resolved. It can paint you into a dark corner down the road of a lengthy project. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jason1025 Posted April 28, 2011 Author Share Posted April 28, 2011 Video capture devices are cheap enough these days that finding one that will allow you to format your drive other than FAT32 might save you a great deal of trouble. You requirement to stay within FAT32 seems to be the root of the problem. Perhaps the company will allow a trade in/upgrade to their product? I have talked to the company but they refuse to change it. I talked to their competitor who makes a similar yet quadruple the price product and they told me why. The expensive company will allow an HFS format to create a single file. But they use hardware encoding.Hardware encoding is great but expensive. About 3K plus special authorized drives add extra 250 a pop and an extra 1k for an anton heavy battery. The product I got uses software encoding, Its basically a computer the size of my fist with a proc or two and its only job is to encode on the fly. It allows you to purchase off the shelf drives for like $100 and the device comes with batteries. It only costs $995.00. I tried to cut a corner and its obvious the company did too. Apparently when you use fat32 it allows the proc or memory to dump its cache every 4 gigs. meaning if you are the manufacturer you can build the thing cheaper. It has all sorts of problems, drifting audio, tearing of picture, dropped frames, lack of format support, the fat32 thing and so on. I am thinking of sending it back. They of couse say the problems will be fixed in future firmware updates but, waiting for those updates and not having a product that does the job sucks. And they got my money. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jason1025 Posted April 28, 2011 Author Share Posted April 28, 2011 Video capture devices are cheap enough these days that finding one that will allow you to format your drive other than FAT32 might save you a great deal of trouble. You requirement to stay within FAT32 seems to be the root of the problem. Perhaps the company will allow a trade in/upgrade to their product? I have talked to the company but they refuse to change it. I talked to their competitor who makes a similar yet quadruple the price product and they told me why. The expensive company will allow an HFS format to create a single file. But they use hardware encoding.Hardware encoding is great but expensive. About 3K plus special authorized drives add extra 250 a pop and an extra 1k for an anton heavy battery. The product I got uses software encoding, Its basically a computer the size of my fist with a proc or two and its only job is to encode on the fly. It allows you to purchase off the shelf drives for like $100 and the device comes with batteries. It only costs $995.00. I tried to cut a corner and its obvious the company did too. Apparently when you use fat32 it allows the proc or memory to dump its cache every 4 gigs. meaning if you are the manufacturer you can build the thing cheaper. It has all sorts of problems, drifting audio, tearing of picture, dropped frames, lack of format support, the fat32 thing and so on. I am thinking of sending it back. They of couse say the problems will be fixed in future firmware updates but, waiting for those updates and not having a product that does the job sucks. And they got my money. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jason1025 Posted April 28, 2011 Author Share Posted April 28, 2011 I think combining video is a bit more complicated than combining text files. Why does the editing program even need them combined? Its not practical to work with segmented files. 1. Exponentially more time consuming when sinking external audio from a separate source from a sound guy. Not practical for specifics to editing. 2. Not practical when adding effects 3. trying to do global effects or time ramps not practical. 4. annoying to have 100 or more extra files for what should be 1 file. Makes things harder to read in the project. I think premiere and vegas (sorry I am on a windows-pc) can create a group from many different video-files which should be manipulateable as any single asset. It is still annoying to import as many files, but it is the best I can think of, OR you just import and render them out after that to one file and use that for editiing. See you *Fuchur* Thanks for the work arounds but if I cant find a way to join the files on the copy, I am sending it back Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jason1025 Posted April 28, 2011 Author Share Posted April 28, 2011 I modified this Automator Apple script I found on line. You must have Quicktime pro installed for this to work. You must have Snow leopard as your OS. Your .mov files must be named something like 001.mov or 1.mov. I could right a renaming script that adds increasing integers to the file names automatically if anyone needs it. Otherwise the order may be off. For some reason I had to make the app sort by descending order for it to put the videos in the correct order. If I do ascending it joins the file backwards. Strange. If its not in the correct order for you simply open the app via Apples Automator which comes with every mac and change the widget thingy I put in to Ascending instead of descending. Instructions: Basically drag and drop. Simply drag the folder containing the .mov files onto the app. The result will be a single large quicktime movie from all the smaller quick times. It will ask you where to save the self containing file. If you want to make sure it worked and in the correct order just click cancel and play the file. You can always save it later or quick and run the app again. I Have not figured out how to pause the play back on the finale quicktime, you will see what I mean its kind of annoying. I will make an update soon. ((((((Updated)))))) I got the pause to work. Wow apple script is easy. I didn't even have to look it up. I simply wrote the command pause movie 1 I just guessed and it worked. QuickTime_Pro_7_Concatenate_Movies_V3.app.zip Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
HomeSlice Posted April 29, 2011 Share Posted April 29, 2011 Thanks for sharing that script! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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