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[davepoobond]

(i'm on a mac)

AVCHD is probably the most frustrating thing I've ever had the pleasure of using.

I have Premiere Pro CS3, it is too old to read AVCHD straight. Fine, no biggy, I'll convert it.

It took me forever to find something that would convert it. I ended up settling with Handbrake but Handbrake has the propensity to autocrop and even though I tell it to not crop it still does. So I end up putting it into HandbrakeBatch convert out the files. They still get cropped. That's still not good.

So, I find a program called RewrapAVCHD which rewraps the video information into an .m4v but doesnt actually convert anything. Now the video file is playable, and readable by other conversion programs but not usable at all in Premiere still (I've had this problem with straight m4v files before) so I try to resave them in QuickTime and it seems to work, but I just need to render all the video when I toss it into Premiere. At least I can use it, but that's going to take forever to open each and save them individually.

So I get MPEG Streamclip and export them into QuickTime movies with Apple Motion JPEG A @ 100% being what seems like the best way without any noticeable quality loss.

And to top it all off there's a third camera with its own fucking codec that JVC developed. Handbrake converted that out fine without any cropping thankfully, since the RewrapAVCHD wont read those .TOD files.


Now, I'm sitting here waiting for 140 files to convert into .mov files to throw into premiere so i can wait another 3 hours and wait for that shit to render and THEN edit it for 14 hours.


Sometimes during this whole process I wished that tapes were still the standard. This is not easier... or am I doing it wrong? I don't even know.

So what I want to know is, does anyone know the proper way to be using these .MTS video files, and what is supposed to be the best way to convert these into something normal to use in a program like Premiere Pro CS 3?

 

[SCULLIBUNDO]

I went through the same shit you're going through right now a few years back. Trust me, just save yourself the hassle and pick up a copy of CS5.

 

[iNvid02]

I went through the same shit you're going through right now a few years back. Trust me, just save yourself the hassle and pick up a copy of CS5.

first reply nails it hard, plus the stuff was heavily discounted a while back

 

[verdures]

Yep, CS6 came out today so the price of CS5 is probably going to drop pretty soon. And converting video is somehow always a drag that ends up wasting a ridiculous amount of time.

 

[davepoobond]

I went through the same shit you're going through right now a few years back. Trust me, just save yourself the hassle and pick up a copy of CS5.

i'm probably going to get cs5 or 6 sometime down the line since its about time to upgrade, but i'm sort of adamant in accomplishing this in cs3 just to prove it can be done at this point. plus, my current computer is a bit old so i dont even know if i can run the new stuff anyway.

I'm guessing that there's no "easier" way to be converting these files out then?

 

[GhostWriter24]

I have an Sony AX-2000 and CS5 handles AVCHD beautifully.

 

[Oppo]

also your standard PS3 can play AVCHD no problem.

and for the love of zod, upgrade your CS, foo... that's your whole issue right there.

also you missed the (admittedly very poorly thought out) crop controls in Handbrake.

i'm probably going to get cs5 or 6 sometime down the line since its about time to upgrade, but i'm sort of adamant in accomplishing this in cs3 just to prove it can be done at this point. plus, my current computer is a bit old so i dont even know if i can run the new stuff anyway

seriously, this is really dumb, stop. they had not yet licensed the codec. go for Adobe cloud, $50/month for the latest and greatest. seriously it's a fools errand, you can't work around codecs like that. you'll end up losing a gen or 2 in transcoding or the like.

 

[davepoobond]

and for the love of zod, upgrade your CS, foo... that's your whole issue right there.

the main person i do video editing work with uses CS3 as well so its more of a convenience factor for both of us. i know you're going to say both of us upgrade but its probably not going to happen.

also you missed the (admittedly very poorly thought out) crop controls in Handbrake.

i actually didn't. for whatever reason, Handbrake uses a different GUI for the cropping numbers which you cannot type in a number and change the number to 0 for all sides, you have to click the down arrow for each side that it is cropping, and even then it only seems to apply that for the one video you're looking at. Would take forever spending 5 minutes on each file click a down arrow when i have like 100 video files.

seriously, this is really dumb, stop. they had not yet licensed the codec. go for Adobe cloud, $50/month for the latest and greatest. seriously it's a fools errand, you can't work around codecs like that. you'll end up losing a gen or 2 in transcoding or the like.

Honestly the output I'm seeing isn't actually bad at all, I know what settings I need to have set up for each of them. I'm really only converting the files once.

and I don't make that much money right now to be paying 50 bucks a month.

 

[Oppo]

the main person i do video editing work with uses CS3 as well so its more of a convenience factor for both of us. i know you're going to say both of us upgrade but its probably not going to happen.

ok fair enough.

i actually didn't. for whatever reason, Handbrake uses a different GUI for the cropping numbers which you cannot type in a number and change the number to 0 for all sides, you have to click the down arrow for each side that it is cropping, and even then it only seems to apply that for the one video you're looking at. Would take forever spending 5 minutes on each file click a down arrow when i have like 100 video files.

ah you did find it. I think you can set that size in a profile though. also you might have to fiddle with the anamorphic setting.

 

[davepoobond]

ah you did find it. I think you can set that size in a profile though. also you might have to fiddle with the anamorphic setting.

yeah the anamorphic setting was throwing me off on top of it because these are 3 different video cameras... 2 use the same resolutions but the older JVC one uses another one and looks all scrunchy in Premiere until i throw it into MPEG Streamclip then it looks great in premiere.


I didn't have the patience to figure out how the presets work in Handbrake -- there just didn't seem to be an option to just disable automatic cropping. Besides, Handbrake files aren't going to work in Premiere CS3 anyway, so I didn't really want to spend more time with it...


it seems like the codec i mentioned in the first post is exporting huge file sizes... like 1 gig for 10 seconds. I'm not really thrilled about that... trying some others out instead