Comments on: Is AVCHD useful?

By: David Sutherland

David Sutherland — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 20:47:41 +0000

I heard handbrake can convert .mts files — but am not sure if it's command line interface-only … ( ref: http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:G4G8VwxryOIJ:... )

By: Michael

Michael — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 17:47:32 +0000

Thanks for your comments David Sutherland. I appreciate the input.

On the mac comment, I think I said ‘professional editing’, not ‘commercial editing’. By professional I mean Hollywood and/or the real entertainment industry. Industrial and religious sectors do a lot of weird things in the name of trying to save a buck. Using windows, premier, sony vegas, D-vision, etc falls in the “what the hay?” category and bores me. Refer to my statement above where I say “I don’t care if you disagree.” Still, no matter what platform or handicapped unprofessional system you’re using for editing, to have any quality in your master you’re going to have to work in a higher quality than any flavor of h.264 or mpeg. This means transcoding your AVCHD source into a higher quality editable codec. Which even on a PC will take a while. I’ll report back later on how fast my 8-core does it. If it’s faster than real time – it’s faster than capturing and we have our advantage.

On the VLC.. Thanks for that. I actually did notice that VLC has a way to export, but it didn’t look as easy as Voltaic. I’m curious about the quality of the scaler in Voltaic. ProRes is 1920 and my MTS files are 1440 = horizontal scaling. Like I said, Voltaic will export to ProRes.. I should check the speed on that too. AIC might introduce some added processing.

MPEG STREAMCLIP would be nice. But those guys never return my emails.

By: david sutherland

david sutherland — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 02:42:52 +0000

good article, especially the observations at the end about the lost benefits of tapeless workflow when dealing with time consuming transcoding

I take exception with a couple points: commercial editing does not just happen on the Mac, it happens whenever someone makes a buck. I’d be interestedd in hearing how Sony Vegas handles Sony .mts files. I am dealing with exactly the same problem of using .mts files, but with an older version of FCP.

re: vlc launching and playback I was surprised at your open with… issues since I don’t recall these. The newer .92 (???) version of vlc handles .mts files a lot better than the .8xx (?) version but you should look harder at vlc since it is NOT just a playback tool. Actually it can be used for transcoding but it isn’t user friendly. Under the open dialogs you’ll find ways to pipe the output out to a file instead of just the screen and there you can find way to many (confusing) ways to save the output.

Also would love to find a great .mts to Apple Pro Res transcoder. (time to lobby mpgstreamclip folks to add .mts to their import capability-???)