Relinking spanned AVCHD in a multiclip?!
Allynn Wilkinson Oct 27, 2012 9:14 AMSo I've got a deadline looming AND a hurricane looming. Oh yeah... and a dead tower (probably bad RAM but no time to look at it now!).
First off, I must say CS 6 (in trial mode) performed very well on my ancient 15" Mac Book Pro with only 2 GB of RAM. Premiere, Audition and Media Encoder all worked quite well on a 20 minute, 3 camera, AVCHD multicam. It's rendering now and I still have time to pull all the lawn furniture in before Sandy comes a knockin'.
But I *did* run into a potential deal killer of a problem relinking the spanned clips. I got around it but I was wondering if there is a better way.
The original project and the three SD card folders were all stored on an external. They had been copied from my work machine on Thursday. Obviously, since the path was different, when I opened the project for the first time all of the media was offline. Premiere did *not* try to show me where it thought the media would be (as FCP 7 does). It just said it was looking for 00000.mts. This is not terribly helpful because I didn't know if it wanted card 1, card 2 or card 3!
Initially, I ignored the linking error when I opened the project and relinked manually by right clicking on "card 1" and pointing to the 0000.mts of card 1. I congratulated myself for being rather brilliant and started to work on the project. About a third of the way along the timeline on a certain camera I had no video. It was just black. In retrospect I should have realized what happened; one of the cameras had had a false start and it was really 00001.mts that started the hour long recording.
After a bit of panic I duplicated the original project (*always* work from a copy when in panic mode!) and tried again. This time I imported each of the three cards again through Media Browser. They were all complete but now they weren't associated with the multiclip. I duplicated the multiclip (**always** work from a copy!) and opened the original in the timeline. This is what I love about nested multiclips... you can swap media around in them and they don't know you did it! Ever so carefully I dragged the intact card 1 to the unlinked card 1 and did the same with 2 and 3. Checked, re-checked and triple-checked the sync. It was good and I could finish the project.
Is this really the way to do it? When I went to export the final, Premiere complained about off-line media in my project and threatened to put that horrible red warning on the finished video! Once I deleted all of the original, unlinked, footage that error went away. Still... kind of scary all around. Is there a better way?



