Submitted by ramblinwreck on Fri, 20/08/2010 - 13:38

Hi,

I'm demoing your product(s) (Voltaic & Flamingo) to help with management of AVCHD files off a Sony HDR-CX300, primarily it solves the problem that iMovie has where it will only recognize the camera if plugged in (or a disk image of the memory) and not if you just copy the MTS files over. Conversions are working pretty well so far.

One question - can VoltaicHD show a "real time" preview of the MTS file? I know it shows a "2 frames per second" preview with no sound, but I cannot find a way to have it show a real time preview with audio. The reason I ask is because iMovie 08 does this when I connect the camera (or mount a disk image). When it gives me the import window, it shows all my clips, and I can *immediately* play any of them with sound - and far as I can tell there's not conversion/transcoding going on in the background. To be clear, this is the step before I tell it to import the clips that I've selected, and so has not yet done the conversion to AIC.

This is a really nice feature, but I can't figure out how to make your product do this. Is it possible?

Bigger picture what I want to be able to do is to winnow down or "cull" back my junk clips immediately after transferring them from my card. I don't want to have to convert/transcode first (taking lots of time) to do that, and I need more than 2fps with audio to do that. iMovie gives me an interface to do that. Is there another way I can do that with your products?

Let me know if my description of the issue is not clear.

I'm still evaluating your product and it seems really good in many respects, but this one issue would really impede my desired workflow. I'm hoping there's a way to do what I've described above. Please let me know.

Thanks
Chris

Voltaic previewing

Submitted by justin on Mon, 23/08/2010 - 12:16.

Hi there,

I understand your need to see the full video with audio as a preview before converting. We added our own previewer to Voltaic to help with this, but if you need more detail there is a (slightly clunky) option.

Firstly you need to install an MTS movie player on your Mac. We recommend Movist (http://code.google.com/p/movist/) as it seems to be the best player at the moment. It uses FFmpeg to playback the movie.

Now associate your MTS files with Movist, so that Movist is the default Open option for MTS files.

Now go back to Voltaic and load up your movies. Right click on them one at a time and do 'Show in Finder'. Once you see the finder, Double click to launch Movist. You will then be able to play them back, if your Mac can handle compressed HD playback.

We can easily add a double-click action to the Voltaic listing to cut out the 'Show in Finder' step. This would mean that double click from the Voltaic list would open Movist straight away (this is how we run Flamingo). Let us know if this would help you out and we'll add it to the next build.

Movist

Submitted by ramblinwreck on Tue, 24/08/2010 - 08:20.

Thanks for the tip - yes I like Movist much better than VLC for what I'm using it for (though I wish it could deinterlace!).

-Chris

previewing

Submitted by ramblinwreck on Mon, 23/08/2010 - 15:14.

Hi Justin,

Thanks for the reply. I did purchase Voltaic but decided to hold of on Flamingo for now (though your planned updates look pretty nifty!).

Since my original post, I came to a very similar workaround on my own, using VLC player. Initially I found that my Mac was unable to play the AVCHD/MTS files, but I upgraded to the latest VLC and voila - it works well! Having said that, I'm not particularly fond of VLC (I've been wrestling with the default sizing of the player window) - so I'll check out Movist.

So for the time being my pre-editing workflow is rather basic:
1 Copy MTS files from camera (or card).
2 Rename MTS files to something useful (YYYYMMDD_HHMMSS.mts). I use PhotoMechanic to do this.
3 In a Finder window, manually play each clip (using VLC) to decide whether it is a keeper or not. Delete if not.
4 Add remaining 'keeper' MTS files to my video library (currently just a set of organized folders, but will watch out for Flamingo!)
5 Convert MTS to low-resolution "preview" clips. I keep a copy of these in iTunes to make it easy to locate clips.
6 Convert MTS clips to AIC, for editing, as necessary.

So I currently only use Voltaic for #6.
I'll might consider Flamingo for #4-5 in the future.
I'd really like to use Voltaic preview for #3 (being able to play each clip from within Voltaic, and delete the non-keepers).
Other users might like having your software do #2, but my existing copy of PhotoMechanic works OK for this (for me).

> We can easily add a double-click action to the Voltaic listing to cut out the 'Show in Finder' step.
> This would mean that double click from the Voltaic list would open Movist straight away (this is how
> we run Flamingo). Let us know if this would help you out and we'll add it to the next build.

That would be really nice to have - yes! :)

I do have another question, and perhaps I should submit a separate thread for this:

I'm a little paranoid about my "out of camera" original data. I don't want to do anything that affects the integrity of the original file, i.e. I don't want any chance of a file being "unreadable" after it having been modified by software. How robust/solid is your 'trim' feature? I'm a little bit afraid to use this on my original source files (I've been making a copy of my video clips, and then using those to trim/convert, then deleting the intermediates when I'm done). Reason I ask is because I read some of your users reported that after trimming that some players didn't display the time elapsed/remaining correctly for a trimmed file.

Thanks for helping. You guys have a nice product.

Chris

Asset management

Submitted by justin on Tue, 24/08/2010 - 12:51.

Hi Chris,

All points 1 through 6 will be addressed by Flamingo in the near term. Here's how:
1. Copy from card/camera: Flamingo does this already and will soon do it a lot better
2. File rename: this is confirmed on the feature list for next release (1.6)
3. Play an MTS file: Flamingo already supports this through a simple double-click to open
4. Organized folders: Flamingo 1.5 now has a completely flexible folder structure which should enable this
5. Low-res preview clips: Flamingo 1.5 has a flexible preview capability that we will build upon in a future release to support video previews.
6. Convert for editing: already in Flamingo

I've added the "double-click to open" to the Voltaic 2.6 feature list. Voltaic 2.6 will be general bug fix release + 3D support.

When it comes to editing Native AVCHD, we still recommend keeping the originals. Our Native AVCHD editing process has a couple of minor bugs raised against it which will be fixed in 2.6. Even with these fixes we recommend always keeping original clips (regardless of what you do with them later).

Thanks for the feedback. Please check out Flamingo 1.5 when it is released in September.

Justin