Random Gotcha - 01/15/11 - Glue Tools Phantom Cine

Random Gotcha - 01/15/11 - Glue Tools Phantom Cine

I'm on my way out of town but I feel inclined to post this BIG old gotcha before I sign off for the week.

As if the Phantom workflow wasn't buggy enough.. Glue Tools makes a plugin that allows for native, real time de-bayering of the Phantom sensor data (.cine file) within Quicktime/Final Cut. It's a pretty great tool because it allows you to make a Compressor droplet for batch transcoding as well as audit the files in an actual video wrapper. The only other way to create useful media from the original camera files is to do it on the PC side in the Phantom software which has a few simple export commands like Uncompressed .mov's, DPX and Tiff stacks, etc. This method is painfully slow so really in my opinion, Glue Tools is the best solution out there for Phantom post. BUT as several users have discovered, occasionally it simply can't read the .cine file and when you open it in Quicktime, this is what you get.

Just a black, unreadable image. No item properties or anything and you'll have the same problem if you try and import it into FCP. This seems to have a lot to do with which Phantom camera the files came out of. I've recently had this problem with HD Gold and v640 files but not Flex. Very odd. The good news is that there is a very easy fix but it's not well known and it was discovered totally by chance in the futility of trying everything to get these files to read. 

Go to System Prefs and open the Glue Tools Phantom Cine controls. Go to "Info" and "Delete Prefs"

That's all there is to it. The files will now open flawlessly in QT and you can very easily set up a Batch Transcode. No mention of this anywhere on the Glue Tools Support Forum. Very frustrating.