Import movies?

Aspect General
1

Is there a way to import movies not just photos?

I imported everything from an SD card and movies didn’t get imported.

Is this expected?

Thank you.

2

All “normal” video files should get imported just like photos*. However, several cameras store videos inside AVCHD databases, which have a rather obscure format that does not have an open specification. Since this can contain metadata inside separate database files, importing just the video files themselves could loose information. Also, the format dictates specific paths and file names for the video files, so that those cannot be trivially reorganized.

For these reasons we have decided to skip AVCHD files during import until we have a proper solution to this. I personally try to avoid AVCHD where possible and instead set the camera to store individual files (e.g. .mov or .mp4) where possible.

For the existing ones, there is a number of free converters that store the videos in a normal container format without having to re-encode. I haven’t tried them, but found these two free offline converters:

* If you do in fact have individual video files and not an AVCHD/.mts database and they are not recognized as media files, which file extension do they have?

3

Understood it’s the AVCHD format only that’s problematic. Good to know.

Thank you.

4

A small update: I’ve taken a closer look and from all that I could gather it appears that in practice there is actually no (additional) important metadata outside of the .mts files. Cameras seem to either not store any meta data at all, or they also store it in the .mts file in addition to the CLIPINF files. So I guess it is actually safe to import the .mts files individually, just like any other video file.

If no contradictory information comes up, I’d just change that accordingly for the next release.

5

I tried on a different camera now (Sony ZV-E10) movies are saved as mp4.

Aspect imports movies no problem.
But it also imports movie thumbnails and thinks they are regular pictures, but for the movies it just shows a black frame no thumbnail image. Do I need to setup something to make this work properly?

movie path: SD card/PRIVATE/M4ROOT/CLIP/C0062.MP4
thumbnail path: SD card/PRIVATE/M4ROOT/THMBNL/C0062T01.JPG

The only image shown on the screeshot is the thumbnail of the last movie:

image
image1340×1308 101 KB

6

Looks like this is an issue of the Linux version that got introduced by a non-backwards-compatible update of FFMPEG. I’ve just tested it and I get the same black thumbnails for videos that otherwise work fine on Windows (and macOS, which doesn’t use FFMPEG, though). I’ll look into that for the next release.

As for the separate thumbnail images, for now, you’d have to run separate imports on /DCIM and /PRIVATE/M4ROOT, as we currently have no rule that associates the thumbnails with the video files — and then consequently skips them during import. You could set up the import as automatic in order to avoid having to perform twice the manual work here.

Unfortunately we don’t currently have a Sony camera at hand for testing this. But if you could record a short test video clip on an empty SD card and send me the /PRIVATE directory content as a zip file, I would also have a look at what we need to support Sony’s XAVC S directory structure (more or less) properly (which is unfortunately the same proprietary idea as for the older AVCHD stuff, but this time Sony-only).

7

I don’t have a spare SD cart at hand at the moment but I’ll get one and I’ll send the data. It might take a week or so since I’m on vacation at the moment.

8

Hello Ludiwik,

I formatted a new SD card and created 1 photo, 1 movie and 1 S&Q (slow and quick) movie.

You can download the compressed sony-zv-e10.tar.zip file with the full directory structure from:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xH5hR2cIHwcB9FVnOk8fE6od0nHj4Rz-/view?usp=sharing

When you have it let me know and I’ll delete the share.

Thank you

9

Got it, thank you!

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10

We’ve been quite busy during the past months working on things not directly related to the release, so this one took a bit longer, but 1.0.0-preview.29, which just came out, is now able to properly import these movies, including the metadata that is stored in some separate XML files.

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