Scene length limit S4000 Pro???

[BobFoster]

A customer brought me a Sony HD camera with 18 hours and 48 minutes of video on it. She wants the video put onto DVDs so that they can clear the camera hard drive. We agreed on using a 4 hour compression to a stand alone commercial DVD recorder to keep down cost and the number of DVDs. I cannot be present at 3:59:59 four different times to pause the play back and start a new DVD. My best option is to load the entire hard drive into the S4000 Pro and split it into 4 hour segments and play them out individually to the stand alone DVD recorder. The S4k indicated 64.6 hours of recording time available. The video on the camera is 16 x 9 standard definition content. The project is set up to those parameters. The timed recording is limited to 180 minutes, so not an option.

I started the process at about 2 PM so that it would finish the next morning. At about 4 hours into the recording, everything was going as planned. I went out to check on the progress at 9 PM and the S4k had stopped recording and reverted to the edit window with no scenes in the scene bin. . Is there some limit on scene length??

[HansJoachimKoenig]

Hi Bob,
if the job only is to clear the cam's drive and to save the footage it's
not so timeconsuming to save on a FAT32 formatted drive.
Since I have the Sony XR-520 I save all cam AVCHD footage on an external harddrive.
Connect via USB cam to PC and copy to ext. drive.
I wonder why a HD cam has been downconverted to produce SD?
Or HD was set in cam to downconverted SD for maybe creating only SD Video DVDs?

[BobFoster]

Actually getting the footage onto DVDs is the primary objective. Clearing the camera HD is secondary. The footage is a documentary of the daughter's life from birth to two years old. I would have assumed that I should be able to record for 24 hours or more continuously if I wanted to use the Cassie as a security camera recording device. I do not know why or when the recorder stopped as there is no scene file to check. If it had been a tape transfer, I might suspect a blank section would have caused the record to stop since I was not using a TBC, but there should have been a scene up to that point. I would think that HD files would be continuous no matter what the camera operator did. There are 201 files on the HD. Thanks for your resonse.

[CasablancaExpert]

Hello Bob,

Apparently there is a limit for continuous recording -- a single stream of video (not an overall capacity for the project or HDD). I have a customer who has found that he records up to between 3 to 5 hours of a single stream of video on his S4000 PRO as well.

Regards,
Chet

[BobFoster]

BUMMER!

[garymcnally]

This analog recording limit will be fixed shortly, but DV recording has no limit.
I would get this:
http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/6 ... n_DVD.html

[BobFoster]

Thanks Gary. Actually the fix was to go back to my Renomee Plus. Although my schedule didn't work out to be able to record the entire 18 hours directly, I was able to record 8 hours continuously without incident nor audio sync problems. I don't think it would have been a problem to record the entire camera hard drive onto my Reno+. Had I known about this little S4K Pro analog quirk, I could have run the video and audio through my Canopus ADVC500 and converted the footage to DV. Maybe next time. Someone should publish a book detailing the various work arounds and limitations of our new improved editing units. Thanks again.
Bob F.

[LouBruno]

Good idea. Note: The AVCHD camera must be set via the menu to 17Mps. The higher bit rate of 24 Mps will not work with this unit.

This analog recording limit will be fixed shortly, but DV recording has no limit.
I would get this:
http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/6 ... n_DVD.html