A "spanned" clip is one in a format (such as AVCHD) that typically breaks the footage down while shooting into say 4:59 bits with perhaps separate audio & video streams, and includes in the folder structure created for it which clip sections are part of each "real" clip you would think you'd created. So ... you may leave the camera on for recording 17 minutes, and think it should be just one clip. But the camera may have 3, 4, or 5 shorter segments that to make that one "clip" need to be joined together, not only for the video but for the audio which was actually recorded into a different sub-folder.
When one copies say the contents of the folder that SEEMS to have one's clips in it, there's stuff missing. Well ... yea, perhaps both the info that would tell the editing program which bits of digital data are really the "same" video clip and in which order, but also ... which other bits in another folder are the audio data for those bits of video data.
If one does NOT copy the entire folder-tree of data created by the camera in exactly the way it was all put to files/folders, well ... you've only odd bits of data.
So ... are your files AVCHD, or "m2t", "mts", "m2ts" or something similar that separates the video/audio streams into different bits here and there, or say, MP4 (or many other codecs) which puts it all in one file?
Neil
