Importing from a Panasonic HDC TM700

OK - VLC plays the converted clips back with sound. Quicktime / iTunes do not. Can anyone here who does get sound using Alan's clip converter confirm if they are on 10.6.x? Similarly, is there anyone here on 10.5 who doesn't have sound?

I am on 10.63 and dod not get audio in QT, but did in VLC. However, I did notice problems when scrubbing the video (skips/jumps). I am going to use clipwrap2. No problems there.... I guess sometimes you get what you pay for!

Dave

I'm running Snow Leopard 10.6.3 and iMovie '08. I was thinking maybe it was iMovie '09 causing the problem, but you're all saying that you don't hear it in QuickTime Player either and I clearly do.

Are all of you not hearing the audio running 64-bit systems by any chance? I'm on a 32-bit Core Duo system, so maybe that makes a difference.

64 Bit

Found it!

Out of the box QT X has issues with M4V and AC3. Google 'quicktime x ac3' for pointers to various discussions on the subject. Seems that some folks are having luck installing Perian, which is a collection of codecs for QT but may require you to run QT in 32 bit mode. I didn't install it since success is not guaranteed.

Instead, I started playing around with the arguments to ffmpeg and discovered that this minimal command line will work (using Alan's syntax from his workflow):

ffmpeg -i "$1" -vcodec copy "$1.m4v"

What this does is re-encode the AC3 track into an AAC track. I couldn't exactly tell if the audio quality was affected. You can also opt to keep the original AC3 track and add a new AAC track with the following command line:

ffmpeg -i "$1" -acodec copy -vcodec copy "$1.m4v" -newaudio

Do either of those and you'll get your sound.

I leave updating your copy of Alan's workflow as an exercise to the reader 🙂

Alternately, maybe someone here with this working 'as is' with QT X on 10.6.x can tell us what other QT plug-ins or codec packs they have installed...

I am running QT 32-bit (obviously) and I do have Perian installed.

BTW, I am working on a self-contained app version of the droplet. I was planning to support multiple containers, but there's no reason I couldn't also support an optional AAC conversion.

I'm running 10.6.3 on a core 2 duo and I get audio inside quicktime player. I'm sure it has to be because of perian which I also have installed.

Just noticed your post. No need to deinterlaced in jes because the video is progressive. And, if anyone ever wants to deinterlaced, handbrake has a great deinterlacer built in.

Anyone have any luck with converting files from this camera through the workflow to play on an xbox 360?

I rewrote the earlier Rewrap2M4V automator app into a ksh script since I like doing things on the command line. Here it is:


#!/bin/ksh
#
# ffwrap - Simple KSH script which takes Pansaonic TM700 raw
# video files as input, and runs them through
# ffmpeg to rewrap them, and make a usable *.m4v
# file which iMovie can read.

if [[ $# -eq 0 ]];then
print "Usage ffwrap filename(s)"
exit
fi

for arg;do
filename=$arg
basename=${filename%.*}
outname=$basename.m4v

# Rewrap file into an .m4v
/Applications/ClipGrab.app/Contents/MacOS/ffmpeg -i $filename -acodec copy -vcodec copy $outname > \
/dev/null 2>&1

print $filename "rewrapped to" $outname
done




One thing that I'm bummed about is that resulting converted file loses all the original EXIF data, including, most importantly, the Date/Time Original field. So after you import the converted movie into iMovie, and you hover your cursor over the clip, the date/time that shows up is not the original date/time when you shot the video; it's now the date/time when you did the conversion.

And unfortunately, if you try to copy the EXIF data from the original video file to the converted file, you'll get an error because writing to an m4v file isn't supported.

Message was edited by: Jaime Villacorte

The ksh script I mentioned above is better described in this post: http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?p=18609350#post18609350

Yes, the .m4v file shows AC3 5.1 audio in QuickTime Player. Still no audio.