Converting .MOD files for Final Cut Pro and Multiclip

I've been handed a few SD cards with .MOD files that eventually need to be edited as a multiclip sequence.

Joy.

I've talked about these problematic files before here and here but never really got into the meat of the best way to transcode them for use in Final Cut Pro. Silly me thought I'd never have to deal with them again.

Here's something to keep in mind about .MOD files (from the wiki page):

"Standard definition video can be recorded in 4:3 and 16:9 formats. Some video decoders do not interpret the aspect ratio information in the media file header correctly, so 16:9 video may appear squeezed horizontally when viewed.^[4] Software that is shipped with camcorders is capable of processing the aspect ratio information correctly, aided perhaps by the metadata stored in MOI files. There are also third-party tools for modifying the wide-screen aspect ratio information in the media file header so that it satisfies decoders which would otherwise fail to interpret this information correctly in an unmodified MOD file.^[5][6][7] Some tools such as MediaInfo can correctly report the aspect ratio of widescreen MOD files, but media players may or may not display them correctly depending on the capabilities of the video decoder that they are utilizing at the time."

Sure are a lot of May, May Not & Somes in those paragraphs; there's even a perhaps!

These are some weird file types.

In order to nail down the workflow for transcoding these things (which, btw are Standard Definition in this particular case) I've been running some tests using MPEG Streamclip to transcode them and here's what I've discovered: (you'll likely need the MPEG-2 Component for Quicktime in addition to MPEG Streamclip)

A: Renaming the .MOD to .MPG or .mpeg and then transcoding with MSC (MPEG Streamclip) doesn't make any difference.

B: The top listing of the two ProRes exports in MSC is a HQ variety. (You may or may not see doubled up listings in your MSC exports listing depending on your setup/system etc…)

I transcoded a sample .MOD file (of about 24 seconds) to various formats, with various settings and then set up a 3 camera multiclip sequence and tested how well it played and if it was the correct aspect ratio.

What I found -after MANY MANY transcodes then importing those into FCP, setting up a multiclip sequence, then exporting and opening with Quicktime Player 7- was that what worked best for me for these files is to transcode them into:

DV25
16:9
De-interlaced

Then setup and edit your Multiclip project and export to Quicktime Movie…

Then open up your export in Quicktime Player 7 and hit Command + J for "Show Movie Properties" and hit the Presentation button and tick "Conform aperture to: Clean". 

See the transcodes from MSC will have this option ticked, but after you export the multiclip from Final Cut Pro this little checkbox will no longer be ticked but will still work. In my tests this checkbox has no effect on .MOD files transcoded to ProRes which would have been nice.

Now with an edited export at the correct aspect ratio you can transcode it to H.264 or whatever you need and it should retain the aspect ratio.

Why DV25? Well the original files are MPG2 in a .MOD wrapper and taking data per pixel, data rates and all that there's not a whole heck of a lot of quality loss (a couple of percentage points?) going to DV25. I suppose DVCPRO25 would work just as well.

Now, keep in mind this is what works for me right now, with .MOD files with this setup that I'm sitting in front of at the moment. The resulting file will be high quality and at the correct aspect ratio.

When Renaming Clips Goes Bad

Sometimes, and I have no idea really what the cause is, but FCP can essentially get a file's info "stuck", almost like there's a symlink between it and a particular clip.

For example, take a look at this:




You can see that clip 6 has the exact same duration as clip 10. Only it shouldn't. And FCP will still treat it as if it's that length by playing black past that point. What happened here is that clip 10 used to be named clip 06.

An editor came along and simply renamed clip 10 to clip 06 and for some reason FCP still thinks it's the duration of it's former self. I don't know if this editor used FCP's renaming function or did it in the Finder, however.

Either way, you can highlight the clip in the bin and then goto Tools>Analyze Movie>Clip and see that FCP knows the actual duration of the clip, but in the bin, in multiclips and in the timeline it will seemingly forever play it back with the wrong duration.

The solution is to treat the clip as if it were symlinked. So you have two options:

01) Delete the errant clip from the Bin. Then either...

02) Copy the clip in the Finder to another place or folder or drive, then copy it back to where it should be, overwriting (or after tossing out) the original file. Then drag it back into your Bin. Or...

03) Simply, (after deleting it from the Bin) move it to another location, drag it back into the Bin, confirm the duration is okay, then delete it from the Bin, move it back to where it should be, then drag it back into the Bin.



For me for one particularly stubborn clip step three was completely necessary. FCP kept thinking it was the wrong clip until I told FCP it was now here, then there in the Finder.

While I'm not sure what causes this behavior, it seems likely it's the result of a multiclip project going from Leopard to Snow Leopard with a renaming session in between.

Be Careful When Reconnecting/Renaming Multiclips

When you have a multiclip already in a sequence, be aware that if one of the clips (or more) was renamed since it was edited into the Timeline, FCP can get confused and attribute TWO file names to one clip.

This will result in all manners of strangeness. For one, even though all the footage in your bin will be properly connected, a multiclip in the sequence in your timeline may still report a red bar over it, and if you hover your mouse over the red bar you'll see FCP complaining that one of the clips is offline...but it's not...it likely it just has two file names attributed to it. One of them being the old file name that's no longer available to FCP.

The solution is to 2nd click on the clip in the timeline, select Reconnect Media and then after connecting the properly named files, ignore the improperly named one(s). You should see the red render bar turn green nearly instantly.

This can happen if the files were initially named incorrectly and an editor renames them from within FCP or in the Finder late into a project's life.

When Multiclips Angles Suddenly Go Blank

Today, while working on a multiclip started by another editor one of the clips in a multiclip segment was visually blank. The audio was there, and it played fine in QT Player but just before the In point (in the Viewer) which was set it would go blank.

An odd behavior was that dragging this angle to the timeline only showed about 1min's worth of footage rather than the full 4+ minutes of the clip. While I'm still not sure what is going wrong -it must have been visible when the original editor was working with it since it's synced up as a multiclip and cut into the Timeline- I solved it by doing basically two things:

01) I simply duplicated the clip in the Finder by Option + Dragging it (old habit, Command + D would have also worked).

02) After appending the name of that clip with "_COPY_", I brought it into FCP's bin, set an identical In point as the original bad clip, then dragged it to the Multiclip open in the Viewer atop the bad angle and waited for moment for a contextual menu to pop up and selected Overwrite Angle.

If you don't see the Overwrite Angle option, check to make sure that the angle you're trying to overwrite isn't currently used (displayed) in the Canvas via the Timeline. You'll have to switch to another angle, Overwrite Angle, then switch back.

Keep an eye on your audio track sources if you encounter this problem and use this solution. They may still come from the "bad" angle clip.

Then I saved the project and everything seemed fine. I'll update this if I find out exactly why FCP suddenly doesn't like that one multiclip angle.

Another potential solution, which didn't work for me, was deleting the clip from the bin and re-dragging it back in. One last thing you can try is to simply re-import the clip which I unfortunately don't have the option of trying with this project.

Update: Another thing to try, and this just worked for me on a project, was to close the project, reopen it, and then Re-Connect all of the media. Maybe just reconnecting the errant media in the timeline would also work. But, it's another thing to try.

The important thing to remember is that you shouldn't get any mis-match errors about "media start and end" when you try and reconnect your footage. If you see that message, hit Try Again and...try it again.

In the reconnect window "Amount with conflicts" should read 0 (zero) if you're trying this fix.

What do to when you loose a camera on a multicam shoot

Say you have a three camera shoot, and one camera goes out during the shooting but is quickly restarted or restored during the take. You can't add that "fourth" clip to the original three via Insert New Angle or Insert New Angle Affiliates because the sync isn't there.

The trick is to truncate the original multiclip in the Timeline at the point where the camera was lost and then create a new, second multiclip (call it part 2) with the "fourth" clip and then place it into the Timeline after the truncated first so it's a seamless edit when the camera was brought back up.

Safari 4.0 how to turn off Top Sites and reclaim CPU cycles

Safari 4.0 is out and it steals a lot of CPU if you're not careful. There's a process called Safari Webpage Preview Fetcher which grabs sites for Safari to take screenshots of in the background for Top Sites.

The problem is this background process can eat up to 10% of your CPU when it's running or more. This isn't good when you need every ounce of power out of your Mac while you render or perform Multiclip edits in FCP.

Worse still, is there is a folder at ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.Safari/Webpage Previews which will fill up with .png and .jpeg screenshots of websites you visit (or don't visit but have bookmarked). Not only is this a security risk, (it'll take screenshots of your web email) but it's messy, can eat up a LOT of hard drive space and keeps backup software needlessly busy.

Here's how to stop all this from happening.

Keep in mind Safari 4.0 only came out a few hours ago so this "fix" hasn't been tested in the long term. I'm trying it right now and so far things seem okay. The only caveat seems to be some sites never finish "loading" because they never have a screenshot taken of them. They do complete loading but you'll see spinning gears on some of their tabs.

1. Quit Safari 4.0 and right-click on it's icon in the Finder. Select "Show Package Contents".
2. Look inside the Contents folder and right-click on Safari Webpage Preview Fetcher and select Compress "Safari Webpage Preview Fetcher".
3. Put the original Safari Webpage Preview Fetcher in the trash and empty it.
4. Navigate to ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.Safari/Webpage Previews and highlight it. Get Info on it.
5. At the bottom click on the padlock, type in your password and then change the Privilege column for your login name to "Read only". Close the Get Info window.
6. Launch Safari.

Btw, a great way to stop ad sites is to set up and use OpenDNS. Also, if you dislike seeing ads in Safari you can install and try either of these: GlimmerBlocker or Safari AdBlock.

An alternate method has been emailed to me which I have not tried so use it at your own risk:

I can confirm that the following list of terminal commands works fine:
cd ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.Safari/
rm -rf "Webpage Previews"
ln -s /dev/null "Webpage Previews"

The only issue is that there is an error logged in the console for each website visited.

I haven't tried this as my method seems to be working so far. I think this is from the discussion forums at Apple. Unfortunately I can't credit the original poster as I'm not sure who it is.

UPDATE: Quit Safari toss this into the Terminal to effectively turn off Webpage Previews:

defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSnapshotsUpdatePolicy -int 2

Then relaunch Safari.

To return to Safari generating Webpage Previews quit Safari then throw this into the Terminal:

defaults delete com.apple.Safari DebugSnapshotsUpdatePolicy

Open Firmware Passwords

Here's a strange one: A friend of mine was editing some multicam footage and suddenly -apparently without reason- it started to severely choke his mac to the point where multicam footage would only play for about 2 seconds before giving up and announcing dropped frames. Literally two seconds.

I tried everything: rebooting, reconnecting his drives, repair disk, repair permissions, all the traditional troubleshooting steps. None worked. Then I tried a safe boot and it didn't take. The mac refused to boot into safe mode, so on a hunch I tried the firmware boot selector by holding down Option when the Mac booted and was prompted for an open firmware password.

So I turned off open firmware password by booting with an OS X install disc and then ran safe mode and zapped the Pram. The choking was gone. Multicam was working again.

So to determine if it was the open firmware password he set recently, I turned it back on and as I suspected multicam choked again.

Now, I'm not sure why but it's 100% consistent. No open firmware password and multicam works. Set an open firmware password and it chokes badly. He's using 4 separate firewire drives for his footage and media files so my only guess at this very strange problem is that somehow when the Mac boots having the firmware locked is preventing something between FCP and the Firewire bus or the drives.

I'm not sure. Any ideas?

Mac Mini with 3 GBs of Ram & FCP

Speaking of Ram, yes it is possible to have 3Gigs of Ram in a Late 2007 (Macmini 2,1) Mac Mini. So, if it's true that FCP can only address at maximum, 2.5 Gigs of Ram, then the Mac Mini is a viable editing platform for SD and maybe 2 streams of HD.

Although, multiclip editing would still be problematic unless you transcode I'm guessing.

Quick tip: Hold OPTION while you select the upper-left Apple menu and see "About This Mac" turn into "System Profiler..."

Syncing Multipclips 1/100th of a Frame at a Time.

When you are positioning your playhead to the sync point of a clip (for example, for a multiclip sequence) that doesn't have synced timecode, or are just trying to get audio in sync or just need more precise control over where the playhead is in an audio clip in the Viewer, hold down Shift.

This will let you scrub and position the playhead in 1/100th of a frame increments. When you mark the In point you'll see FCP move things to the nearest frame to the point you positioned your playhead. It can help when you need precise sync and In point control. But this only works in Audio, not Video.

Multiclip Labels

Here's a quick handy tip.

I use labels extensively in FCP. Red generally meaning bad and green generally meaning good with other colors to indicate variances thereof. However, if you create a new multiclip and then highlight that multiclip in the Browser, then assign it a label, FCP will also likewise label the clips that comprise that multiclip and are also set as Video and Audio source in the viewer (even it they aren't loaded into the Viewer).

I'm not sure how handy this is, but since you can highlight a multiclip in the Browser, give it a label, and FCP will also label the clips choosen for Video and Audio so you can see which are being used -I guess- at a glance without having to open that multiclip and load it into the Viewer. Maybe not practically handy, but fun to know I suppose.

It seems a tad buggy at times, where you have to load the multiclip into the viewer to get some kind of labeling voodoo to reset if it only labels the multiclip itself but overall it works.