Did you not see the video? Well, consider this the TL;DR version, though far less comprehensive.

For reasons unknown, when Samsung developed the NX500 camera, they decided that the best way to encode the video coming out of their very nice camera would be in H.265 rather than the usual H.264. Which, sure, it's technically more efficient, but it's also so non-standard right now that none of the major editing suites supported when it when the camera came out (guess which software versions I have). Same with their format for saving RAW images: SRW. They had to give, with the camera, software to convert both of those formats into usable files. Faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaantastic.

Unfortunately, transcoding media takes a MFT (metric fuck ton, as opposed to imperial fuck ton) of time and will bog down the resources of any computer you do it on. And that's FINE. The faster the better. But does it HAVE to be done on my main editing rig? I say nay! I have other computers this can be done on while I COULD be doing something productive (not saying I always do, sometimes I just play Overwatch).

Sure, I could do all the steps for this manually, but I'm also LAZY. That special kind of lazy that compels me to reverse engineer stuff, learn new stuff, and make new stuff in order to not have to do all the steps myself.

So, step by step, here's how this works:

  1. I connect my camera to the ingest server (my workbench computer) via USB.
  2. I sit my lazy ass down at my editing workstation a fire up a local batch file via a shortcut in the start menu.
  3. That batch file, via PsExec, fires up a batch file on the ingestion server.
  4. THAT batch file then proceeds to send a message to my editing workstation via the built in Windows "msg" command to let me know that it has started.
  5. It then uses FastCopy to copy all the images to my editing workstation and all of the videos to a local folder for them to be transcoded, reporting back to my editing workstation on the start/completion of each step.
  6. Once all that is done, it starts, one by one, transcoding the videos from H.265 to H.264 using FFMPEG and saves them in another folder where they sit to cool for 10-15 minutes before eat- er, before being copied.
  7. It then uses fastcopy to copy all the files to my editing workstation.

In my case, all network traffic between my editing workstation and the ingest server happens over a dedicated gigabit network through a single cat5e cable ran from one computer to another. Because large file transfers over wifi on a local network is for squares and I'm no square, no matter how hip it is to be one.

And that's it!