Editing Sanyo MP4 files

[John Hedgecoe]

Neo Scene doesn't work with the 1080P60 files. When you try to play them back they play back at 30 fps (ie slow motion) and the sound is out of sync.

However, the HDLink that comes with ProspectHD offers 60P to 30P conversion. SO I am going to try that and see if it solves the problem.

But even if it does, the cost of ProspectHD to way too much to make that a viable option.

Looks like the best option is to avoid 1080P60 altogether and shoot only at 30P.

[Ron Chau]

Neo scene works with my FH1 1080 60p files no problem. Converts them to 1080 60p avi files which I edit in Sony Vegas.

[Dave Haynie]

I'm currently transcoding my seventh soccer match shot in 1080/60p and edited in Cineform 1080/60p. Works great. Anyone having trouble might need to check if they're using the very latest version of NeoScene.

I think the big advantage of shooting in 1080p is that you have one format that can properly render out to anything else you might want. For Blu-Ray, I could go 1080/60i or 720/60p. Definitely want progressive for the web.

If you know with perfect clarity that you only want 1080/60i or 1080/30p, sure, shoot in that mode. But the 60p is the best thing for sports, no question about it. This was driven home even more last week, when I did a highlights video from last season, all shot in 1080/60i HDV.. all those mice teeth! Now, you don't see that on an interlaced display, and probably not on a digital TV pretending to be interlaced (few actually support real interlacing anymore), but you sure see it on-screen. And where you can view, 60p just rocks for action shots, versus 60i or 30p.

[Dave Haynie]

I was playing around with editing FH1 1080/60p files in Vegas... just couldn't get it to happen. No matter what I did, Vegas always crashed. I also wanted to catenate/append some sequential stuff that went past the 4GB limits.

In a round-about way, I got the merged MP4 files created (without any recompression) from the originals from the FH1, and tried these in Vegas. Wow... they work. In fact, they work everywhere the original FH1 files wouldn't but should have... not just Vegas.

The round-about way, unfortunately, takes awhile. I tried to use YAMB (GUI to MP4Box) to merge MP4 files, but this didn't work properly. I used MkvMerge to build a single .mkv file (same contents, just the Matroska media wrapper rather than the MPEG-4 wrapper), worked great. This .mkv file then worked just dandy in YAMB, to create the more-reliable .mp4 file, as well as collect up a bunch of individual files into one logical unit.

So clearly, there's something wonky/non-standard in the Sanyo files.. some programs care about that, some don't. There's got to be a more efficient way to do this, but at least it's a proof of concept.