Media Obsession

I have a bit of media obsession going on. Lots of parents remark about it when I go to school events and sports events. I’m kind of self-conscious about it. Yet I don’t do anything to curb my obsessive compulsive disorder to record every event I can. I’m that guy with the camera and the tripod. I’m the one who sends out the e-mail to the team with the YouTube video link to today‘s game. I’m that guy.

I recently got a Sony α NEX-6 and this camera has only made things worse. It’s a small compact mirrorless camera that has a reasonably-sized APS-C sensor.

 

 

That’s short of a full-frame 35mm sensor and it lacks the fast-focus you get from a good DSLR, but mirrorless cameras are one of those disruptive technologies that I feel are likely to displace cameras that contain a mirror mechanism for exposure and focus. The camera also takes HD video, like your iPhone. But unlike your iPhone, it takes progressive 1080p video at 60 frames per second, at a decent bitrate and with low noise. The bitrate is pretty good, 28Mbps… but videophiles say  the bitrate should be a bit higher, say 35Mbps or more. From what I can see, the bitrate is fine for my needs as I don’t notice any low-bitrate artifacts. But then again, I’m not an expert. It must suck to be one of those experts cause they are always criticizing products. They seem like a really unhappy bunch.

So, I have this camera that can take decent stills and good video. I shoot in RAW, which yields rather large proprietary files. All good cameras shoot in RAW, which is just the camera’s native data for an image with no JPEG compression. I wind up converting these  RAW files into Adobe Digital Negative (DNG), which offers some lossless compression and halves the size of the files. DNG’s also work well in Photoshop, which is my primary tool for messing with the images. The video taken by the NEX-6 is in AVCHD format, which the Mac doesn’t like too much. It’s a good format in terms of file size to quality. It seems to be natively understood by the Blue-Ray spec, so you can basically copy AVCHD files onto a DVD-ROM and play them like a Blu-Ray disk. I haven’t tried it yet.

The problem with dealing with these files is there are so many of them. Particularly when you’re so obsessive like I am. The import tools are pretty primitive. I wind up copying the files by hand with little assistance by software. Unfortunately, the filesystem time differs from the shoot time. This is not a big deal until you start to get tens of thousands of files. iPhoto does a good job  on import and it organizes files by the shoot time contained in the EXIF tags. I never used iPhoto for RAW files (or DNG’s) but I tested it this weekend and it seems to work reasonably well. I may start using it. Here is how one of my DNG files appears in iPhoto:

There is no analogous media manager for AVCHD files, which are not supported by iPhoto. I would not really want the files in iPhoto anyway. iPhoto hides the photos in a special package file. The package file looks like an ordinary file, but it’s actually an elaborate directory structure where the original media exists, thumbnails exist, modified copies exist, etc. In case you didn’t know, all OS X Apps are package files. They have tons of files hidden within. The Finder abstracts this from you and presents .app files as a unique  icon that looks like a single file. I guess most of you knew this already.

Getting back to iMovie, iMovie sees all moves in an iPhoto libray as a single “event” called “iPhoto Movies”. If you have years of video clippage, clicking on that folder in iMovie means you want 10 minutes for the thumbnails to load. Ick. No, I need the video files separate in the file system. In fact, editing programs that I currently use like Adobe Premier, write a lot of extra files to the directory where the video clips reside. Imports in Premiere link to files, rather than make a copy. I am not sure how iPhoto would react to these extra files.

But remember I basically copy my AVCHD files onto my computer manually. To make matters worse, my camera starts movie filenames back at 00000.MTS each time I clear the directory. This is unlike the photo files, which maintain an increasing image count. I believe the reason for this is the directory structure maintained by the camera fits some insane spec for AVCHD/Blu-Ray file structures. It seems if you have 5 video files in this dir structure, the first one must be 00000.MTS. That’s my theory.

So I find I’m perplexed as to how I can effectively manage the video imports. I started to just manually create directories but that was so arbitrary and prone to typos. I was not happy about that. I was sent into fits of depression. I didn’t talk to anyone. I really had a hard time residing to the fact that I’d need to manually create folders like 2013/January/Massapequa Wrestling Match. To make matters worse, the file datatime stamps were wrong. They reflected the time I imported the video and not when the video was taken.

So I hacked some bash, dawg, and created a little tool called exiforg. You can find the source code on the GitHubs. This script reads the EXIF tags from the file, figures out the date the media was recorded and does two things:

• Touch the media files with the datetime stamp of recording
• Optionally moves the file into a date directory, e.g.  2013.01.14

This yields a nice structure like so:

.
├── 2012.11.29
├── 2012.12.02
├── 2012.12.07
├── 2012.12.11
├── 2012.12.13
├── 2012.12.14
├── 2012.12.20
├── 2012.12.21
├── 2012.12.22
├── 2012.12.23
├── 2012.12.24
├── 2012.12.25
├── 2012.12.29
├── 2012.12.30
├── 2012.12.31
├── 2013.01.01
├── 2013.01.05
├── 2013.01.06
├── 2013.01.09
├── 2013.01.12
└── 2013.01.13

In each directory, I have AVCHD files. If I used those files in an Adobe Premiere project, then I also have a lot of temp files. One recent addition I made was to introduce README.md files, in markdown format, which allow me to journal the story behind the  videos in that directory.

 

That is all I have to say about this.