surveillance camera footage

[F Bulgarelli]

Hello

Does any one have experience transferring footage from a surveillance system so that it can be used with FCP

It's suppose to be H264 but the files come up as a series of numbers plus .264 at the end (no H)

Really weird

 

Any help is appreciated

 

 

Thanks

 

Francisco

[Marcus Joseph]

Have you tried Apple's Compressor to transcode? If not that, maybe Adobe Encoder.

[Marcus Joseph]

Also maybe try renaming the files with .mov at the end.

[Adrian Sierkowski]

Also try MPEG Streamclip, a free program. If you can get it open in there you can use the "make .dv" functionality to shoot it out as a .dv file which'll work fine in FCP.

[Keith Walters]

Hello

Does any one have experience transferring footage from a surveillance system so that it can be used with FCP

It's suppose to be H264 but the files come up as a series of numbers plus .264 at the end (no H)

Really weird

 

Any help is appreciated

 

 

Thanks

 

Francisco

 

The series of numbers are probably just a time and date code.

 

Could you post a short sample recording here so we can have a look at it?

If you can play it on a PC, SUPER, Handbrake or a similar FF-MPEG based transcoder should be able to change it to something meaningful.

 

Avidemux is a free FF-MPEG based editor which is also pretty good at figuring out weird formats. It's a bit counterintuitive to use at first, but once you get the hang of it it's really easy and fast. Anyway, it's dead easy to see if it can play the file at least , and it doesn't need a file extension to work out what it is. If it can play it, you should be able to export it to just about anything.

 

Its only vice is that if for example, you export to MPEG, it doesn't automatically add the .mpg suffix, you have to type that in yourself.

 

With some proprietary surveillance codecs the only practical solution is to take a composite video output from the system (assuming one is available) and record that with a DVD recorder or a PC capture card.

[Phil Rhodes]

I did some consultancy work for a company specialising in playout of surveillance material a few years ago, when disk based CCTV systems were starting to become popular. Playing the damn stuff back is such a problem that this company makes a lot of money selling all-in-one devices to the police that are designed to solve the problem. It involved an awful lot of software. There appear to be precious few standards and a desperate need for a good one. Frankly most of them were either h.264, MPEG-2, or some variation on a stream of JPEGs , but there are some really oddball things out there, such as the Sony system that used DVCAM tapes in a proprietary format. Presumably these things will be in use for many years to come and we'll be dealing with the lack of standardisation for a while.

 

If it says 264 on the end it's probably h.264, which is invariably supplied in an MP4 wrapper. As such, you might try renaming it with an .mp4, .mov or other extension. But really, the best way of finding out if it's trivially playable by preexisting software is to get VLC and drop the file into it. VLC is a video player that looks much like Windows Media Player or Quicktime, but it doesn't rely on the file extension to figure out what the content is, it does that by examining the file. It uses a battery of decoders related to the super-comprehensive FFmpeg open source tool, and if you find that VLC will play it, you should be able to get FFmpeg, or an FFmpeg-based tool, to transcode it into something useful. VLC has a "media information" menu option which will tell you all about what it thinks the file is, which may be useful in terms of ascertaining its resolution and frame rate, but either way, if VLC will read it FFmpeg probably will and from there on in your problem is largely solved.

 

If VLC will not read it, in the absence of a proprietary player or conversion tool from the surveillance system's manufacturer, you are probably doomed to Keith's composite video solution. You could have a look at it in a hex editor - or I can - to see if it's something really trivial, like a stream of JPEGs, but I suspect with that file extension it isn't. If you can play it back on a computer you control using the manufacturer's software, you can also try screen-capture software such as Fraps, which will allow you to capture the display to a file and then worry about removing all the duplicate frames and extraneous user-interface graphics. Sometimes Fraps has problems with overlaid video displays, depending how the software works and which operating system is in use.

 

P

[Keith Walters]

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[Keith Walters]

deleted duplicate post

[Keith Walters]

if VLC will read it FFmpeg probably will and from there on in your problem is largely solved.

 

AVIdemux is almost as easy to use as VLC for playing files, and it has the advantage of being able to edit and transcode as well.

In the "copy" mode it does an excellent job of locating the optimum edit points, so you can, for example, extract and assemble a "showreel" from DVD VOB files or digital TV .TS files, without needing to decode and re-encode the MPEG2 data stream. You can't always cut exactly where you want to, but that's usually of no importance.

 

By the way, I'm still having no luck downloading a working up-to-date version of FFMPEG.

They have some pretty twee names for the download versions available, which give little clue as to what they actually are. I've downloaded a couple of different "things" and they both unpack into a 14MB or so folder with a frightening number of files, none of which appears to be FFMPEG.exe.

 

I'm sure they think they're being pretty witty; in reality they're indulging in the sort of twattery that gives geeks a bad name :rolleyes: