AVCHD Rewrapping

Question

Level 1

8 points

AVCHD Rewrapping

Hi,

I am new to HD video editing, and have been using iMovie 11 for a while, but have not been happy with it. I was very excited about Final Cut Pro X, mainly because I was excited about the idea of natively editing my .MTS files from my Canon M41.

I downloaded Final Cut Pro X last night, and I quickly realized I must have misunderstood the whole .MTS editing, since I found out I need to have a camera archive or import the files from the camera. I was really disappointed that I could not take my original .MTS files by themselves and open them without all of the file structure from the original recordings. So, that is a lesson learned, and going forward I will make archives.

So, finally, here comes my question. Upon importing a camera archive file, I do not select any transcoding options, leaving it to native importing. Final Cut imports the videos and shows rendering going on in the background. I assumed that, since it is supposed to work with AVCHD (MTS) natively, it would just reference my .MTS file and bring that in without any transcoding. I found out that it is still creating a new .MOV file conversion from my original .MTS file. The file isn't much bigger, so I assume that Final Cut is just rewrapping it? I really wanted it to work off of the .MTS file because it wouldn't take up more hard disk space just to have a re-wrapped file. This wasn't what I was assuming was native file editing. At work, I use Premiere, and it opens up our Panasonic .MTS files by themselves with no archive or issues. What am I missing? Is this just the way it will work for me? I really wanted to save some space on my hard drives, instead of duplicating each .MTS file as a re-wrapped .MOV file.

Any information would be appreciated! Thanks!

Posted on Jun 22, 2011 8:14 AM

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Answer 1

Jun 22, 2011 10:33 AM in response to jasond85

I'm interested in buying fcpx or premiere. premiere will cost more and I would buy an Nvidia card to go with. which its better?

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Answer 2

Jun 22, 2011 10:56 AM in response to jasond85

I think you're correct; I was trying this last night and it appears to simply re-wrap as a Quicktime file, adding just a little to the file size. If you check "optimize media" then it will transcode as a ProRes file, the default of which will be 10 times the size.

At the end of the day, FCPX is still a Quicktime-based editor like its predecessors, so editing MTS files 'natively' means FCPX is copying it to your HD as a Quicktime-compatible file, via a rewrap; that's how it looks to me. For mts files to have worked directly in the timeline means that Quicktime would have to support them, and it still does not. If Quicktime Player can't open the file, chances are Final Cut can't.

The improvement over previous versions though, is that FCPX seems to do this rewrap instead of defaulting to transcode everything to ProRes or Apple Intermediate Codec, etc. So with these H.264-based rewrapped MOV files, your HD capacity isn't taxed as much.

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Answer 3

jasond85 Author

Level 1

8 points

Jun 22, 2011 2:35 PM in response to Geoff Kaiser

Thanks Geoff! I thought this is what it was doing. I guess it isn't my ideal solution, but better than iMovie 11 converting it to AIC and blowing the file size up. Still a little bummed out about not being able to open individual .MTS files without the original file structure, since Premiere does this.

Guess I will try to get my workflow worked out soon!

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