A curious (missing AVCHD files) tale.

[Zippy]

Hi all!

I've been shooting AVCHD with my Panasonic SD1 for some time now, and gleefully editing in VS11.5+ with minimal problems. Upgraded to VS X2 pretty much as soon as it was released - great.

No then:

I merrily imported a bunch of new footage the other day (via the capture-->import digital media route) just as I'd gotten into the habit of doing in VS11.5

Started to edit, and all was cool, until I realised I was missing some clips. So I went back to check my import... there were 31 clips to import, I'd done a "select all", it had imported 31 clips.... Odd.

So I looked directly at the contents of the SD card, to see there were in fact 47 clips on it! Bemused, I repeated the whole process to make sure I wasn't going bonkers, which I wasn't.

Anyway - something posessed me to just drag-n-drop one of the .MTS files direct into VS X2 without importing, and to my pleasure & surprise, it dropped in and seems to edit perfectly.

So I have two questions:

a. Any ideas why VS doesn't see all of my clips when importing?

b. Does anyone know of a reason why I shouldn't just drop the .MTS files direct from my SD1 into VS and edit them from there?? It seems to work just fine, and saves a lot of disk space!!

Comments/help greatly appreciated,

Zippy!

[Ken Berry]

a. Not really. It is usually better to import to the computer using the software which came with the camera. Hopefully someone else might have a better idea.

b. Going that way would mean that each time you opened that project, you would need to have the camera and card connected. Having a project involving video which is still on the camera card is not the same as having that video on the computer, where it can be constantly accessed by the program. It is only after you have rendered the video into a new file that you can actually turn off the camera. Otherwise, you will get constant re-link messages.

The other way you could do it, though, would be to use a card reader, and leave the card in that and the reader connected to your computer until the editing is done.

[Zippy]

Ken, hi!

Thanks for the response...

As it happens, I pull ALL my footage down to my PC as a matter of course anyway, and work on it from there - and back it up, and back it up, and keep a copy off-site, and... so relinking isn't an issue for me... but having VS create (effectively) duplicates of all my raw footage was beginning to gobble up more disk space than was convenient.

Looks like working with the straight .MTS files is a geor then.

So if there's one GREAT thing they've done in X2, for me, this is it!

Zippy!

[2Dogs]

Hi Zippy,

Do you ever go up to the Dark Peak and check out all those WW2 plane wrecks?

Does anyone know of a reason why I shouldn't just drop the .MTS files direct from my SD1 into VS and edit them from there??

In this thread, in the fourth post on the page, Przemek suggests that importing the clips using the bundled Pixela Image mixer software that came with his Canon gave better results than just copying the mts files off the card.

http://phpbb.ulead.com.tw/EN/viewtopic. ... c&start=30

I merrily imported a bunch of new footage the other day (via the capture-->import digital media route) just as I'd gotten into the habit of doing in VS11.5

I'm intrigued by what you mean by this. I use VS11.5, and can find no such option. In the capture tab, there are just options for capturing from a camcorder, DV quickscan, import from DVD/DVD-VR or AVCHD and import from mobile device. If using the latter and pointing to the SD card, the mts files are simply imported as mts files. Otherwise, there just remains the options to "insert media file" into either the timelne or the library. None of that sounds like what you mention. Have I missed something?

[Zippy]

2Dogs, hi!

Oh yes, there are various lumps of mettlework scattered around Kinder & the such-like! One of my favourite hiking areas. Had been thinking of writing some of it up on the website/blog but, frankly, walking in the Peaks has been well & truly covered by others!

Anyway - back to VS:

Slightly errant terminology on my behalf. Yes, VS 11.5 has the import from DVD/DVD-VR option, it's been renamed "import digital media" in X2, but does the similar job.

For ME (!), my SD1 creates a standard AVCHD folder structure on the SD Card. The stream files themselves are suffixed .MTS I've always copied the entire SD card content to the hard disk of the workstation as a matter of course - so it all gets included in my backup set. Paranoid about data loss?? Oooh yes! So my imports were actually from the HDD on my PC, not form the SD Card, not that it should make any difference.


If I import, VS (both versions) creates a bunch of .m2t files in the VS working folder. In VS11.5+ I found I had to do this - it seemed to be the only way to get things to work. And I had massive problems with the thing bombing out until the patch was released (on a vista Home premium machine, but not on a vista enterprise on of otherwise identical build spec). So importing sort-of became habit.

SO: whilst searching for my missing clips, I noticed that the .m2t files were exactly the same file size as the original .mts files. I figured that there can't be much difference in the files, so tried dropping one direct into the timeline and, hey presto, it works perfectly

As for image quality, it seems to be spot on. Some "JPEG" noise on really fast moving stuff, as seems to be the case with these cameras, but no discernable difference between the .mts and the .m2t. And a million times better than converting the raw files to MPEGS as was the only option when I first bought my SD1

I think this makes sense!?!?

Zippy!

[2Dogs]

Hi Zippy,

I worked on re-valving the Torside and Arnfield reservoirs in the late 70's, but at the time I was unaware of the existence of all that stuff on the Dark Peak - so I missed an opportunity to go see it all. Now I'm living in NW Louisiana....

Anyway, I'm glad to hear that your own experiences appear to disprove a theory that better AVCHD editing results can be had
when working with clips imported thru the Pixela Image Mixer software.

Now what I believe will be critical is for Corel to come up with patches to enable successful editing of video from the mainstream cameras, such as those from Canon, Sony etc.

If they simply keep telling users that the cameras are unsupported, the inevitale result will be a migration of those users to software that can edit AVCHD properly.

[Zippy]

Hi 2Dogs...

Ah - hardly an afternoon stroll from Louisiana to the Dark Peak!! I hope the scenery around you is as nice

Must confess, when I got my HD camera, I got mighty frustrated with what seemed like technology that was ahead of itself. Jumped through all sorts of hoops be be able the edit the stuff, and each hoop seemed to bring about a degradation in quality. I (stupidly?) hadn't budgetted on buying a quad-core either!!

That said, X2 does now appear to be handling my footage extremely well, so I'm pretty pleased. Before X2 was out I did look at Premiere, but the demo version has all the HD features disabled so I couldn't evaluate them. Saved me ~£600

(I've yet to look carefully at the AVCHD rendering glitches mentioned elsewhere on the forum - too busy organising my main edits at the moment)

Zippy!