My friends and I in Ensemble Evolution had a great idea for our Piteå Percussion Repertoire Festival: “Let’s record ALL of the seminars and concerts!! We can just use the little camcorders from the school service centre.”

The result? About 140GB of messed up AVCHD MTS files and separate audio recordings. There are lots of problems with doing this much recording with these kind of cameras but for now I have a reasonable workflow for making something useful out of all the mess!

Problem 1 – capturing from the camera

If you can plug the camera directly into a computer, iMovie or Final Cut Pro (7) can usually import all of the recordings which takes a LONG time. In our case, we used three cameras which needed to be returned so I copied the contents of their hard drives onto my external drive to deal with later. As it turns out, iMovie won’t import from the copied file systems and FCP will sometimes using Log and Transfer. One of the three cameras worked with FCP and the other two were no good. So I had to do something else!!

Problem 2 – joining split MTS files

If you dive into the file system of the Sony cameras I was using, you find lots of huge .MTS files. These are the videos saved in AVCHD format! Unfortunately, each recording was split up into 2.12GB chunks… (FAT32 maximum filesize attack… hurr durr). Luckily, you can join them together using “cat” in terminal.

compy:STREAM charles$ cat 00000.MTS 00001.MTS 00002.MTS > joined.MTS

(It’s easy to see where each scene ends, because the last chunk has a filesize of less than 2.12GB.)

Now, MTS chunks are back together as they were meant to be and they can be played back in VLC if you want to check them out. BUT, they won’t play in Quicktime so you can’t import them to iMovie or FCP the way they are.

Problem 3 – fixing AVCHD for Quicktime

The MTS files are a perfectly normal video format (H.264 with AC3 sound) but Quicktime doesn’t know what to do with them. I use Remux (free) to repackage the MTS files into an mp4 file with AAC audio (since I’m replacing the audio later anyway…).

It’s not exactly quick to use remux on a 12GB file, but it’s a lot faster than transcoding into mp4 using Handbrake.

After remuxing the file you can play it in Quicktime and import into iMovie FCP or anything else easily! YAY!

Lots of the finished videos are going up on our Vimeo page now!

I’ve been experimenting a bit with a cute blogging engine called Toto and wanted to migrate my Posterous posts so I wrote a little script in Ruby to download them all and format them in a Toto-appropriate way.

This script uses the posterous gem just to retrieve each post and put it in a YAML text file that Toto can understand. At the moment there are a few problems…

• Since YAML uses “:” as a control character I had to remove any colons from titles and replaced them with dashes… I wonder if there’s a way to preserve them so that the text files are still human-readable?
• The posterous gem only seems to get one page of posts at a time since my blog has 19 pages, I just ran my downloading method for each one.

Anyway, here’s the script! Maybe someone will chime in and tell me all the things I’m doing wrong.

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

require 'posterous'
require 'toto'

Posterous.config = {
  'username'  => 'username',
  'password'  => 'password',
  'api_token' => 'api_token'
}

include Posterous

@site = Site.primary

Dir.chdir( "~/src/posterousparser" )

def saveposts(pagenumber = 0)
  @site.posts(:page => pagenumber).each do |e|
    timestamp = e.display_date
    yyyy = timestamp[0..3]
    mm = timestamp[5..6]
    dd = timestamp[8..9]

    title = e.title.gsub(":", "-")
    slug = title.strip.slugize
    filename = "#{yyyy}-#{mm}-#{dd}-#{slug}.txt"

    puts "Writing #{filename}...\n"

    file = File.new("#{filename}", "w")
    file.puts "---\n"
    file.puts "title: #{title}\n"
    file.puts "author: #{e.user["display_name"]}"
    file.puts "date: #{dd}/#{mm}/#{yyyy}\n"
    file.puts "timestamp: #{e.display_date}\n"

    file.print "tags: "

    e.tags.each do |a|
      file.print "#{a["name"]} "
    end

    file.puts "\n\n"
    file.puts "#{e.body_full}\n"
    file.puts "\n"
    file.close

  end
end

puts "Downloading posts now!"

for i in 1..19 do
  saveposts(i)
end