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Teacher-New to Adobe Premiere
I’m new to Premiere Pro, I have been teaching final cut X for a long time at my High School. My students shoot with several different models of Canon camcorders which record AVCHD files. I have recently discovered that Premiere Pro does not import/ingest AVCHD files from the SD card the way FCP X does, ugh!
I searched around and heard that Adobe Media converter could convert the files to quicktime files that can be imported into Premiere Pro. Everything looked to work great but, the audio in some of the files is very out of sync.
So, can anyone tell me a simple way to get footage on a canon AVCHD SD card into Premiere pro for editing?
Thank you!
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11 Replies
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If you’re having issues and need to convert the files, try Transcoding on import into Premiere rather than going via Media Encoder.
New Project / Ingest settings / Transcode
John Williams
Soho Editors
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Hi David,
Here’s “best practice” for ingest of SD cards to Premiere.
#1: Create a NEW folder on your video hard drive for EACH card, named such as “Card_1”, “Card_2”, etc. or whatever makes sense for you. I will put those folders inside the main folder I have created for the Project, maybe inside a VIDEO sub-folder if using multiple cards.
#2: Copy ENTIRE contents of SD card to associated folder, exclude nothing. One card per folder!
#3: In Premiere, use the MEDIA BROWSER to find your SD card folder, and import the files that way, do NOT use File > Import method.
That should do it! Has many benefits, one of which being that long recordings that might be broken into several smaller pieces on the SD card will import into Premiere as one long continuous clip with no audio issues.
Thanks
Jeff
Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers -
I do what Jeff says with my P2 cards, and it solved my issues. The “import” function in Premiere isn’t even recommended in the Abobe training manual I bought… it’s kinda broken, maybe. (At least, it doesn’t work as well as it’s FCPX counterpart does, IMO) Which gave me no end of problems the first two months I used Premiere at work.
But Media Browser will do the job, if you first copy off the footage as Jeff described. That’s just good practice, since then you can eject the cards and hold onto them as last back-ups, should something fail hard.
On my home rig, MPEG STREAMCLIP still works, and for my prosumer camcorder SD cards similar to what your students use, I often use that app to pre-convert everything to ProRes first, then do my actual ingest using the ProRes. If your rigs can’t run Mpeg Streamclip any more, there are other free and low-cost options out there. FFmpeg comes to mind, and now there’s a simple GUI-driven interface for that. VLC might, “Switch” also is an option. You could also make and store a sort of batch process in Media Encoder, I guess, as a preset. I wonder if you couldn’t also do this converting with QuickTime?
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Good suggestions from Mark. I should add that we can’t always keep the SD card for backup since they often must be used for other shoots, so in that case, I do copy my “Card” folders to another hard drive for backup, also good practice. Of course, once you copy any SD card to hard drive, CHECK THE FOOTAGE before formatting/reusing the SD card, to make sure the copy went well and no problems with footage. Import into Premiere and scrub clips, just make sure things look okay right away.
These new practices do make me miss the old MiniDV tapes….yes it took time to “capture” the tapes, but then I always had the tape on the shelf for a backup. I still have DV tapes that are are over 20 years old and play perfectly. Try to keep DATA on hard drives for that long…good luck!
One last thing, File > Import does work just fine for stand-alone files, like a ProRes or .avi video clip. It is the card-based formats that are problematic, since there is extra meta-data on card that is often needed for Premiere to properly interpret/handle the clips. Sometimes audio and video might even be stored separately on the card, so again Media Browser figures all of that out for you where Import is a “dumb” importer.
Thanks
Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers -
Thank you for this! I tried this today and set it to transcode to proRes 422 in Premiere and it opened up in Encoder and converted all files to .mov. Seemed to worked perfect! Took a little time but all seems good.
David Schaeffler
High School Teacher of Broadcasting and Film -
Will this convert the MTS files to .mov? If not file import how do I ingest them in the Media Browser?
Thank you!David Schaeffler
High School Teacher of Broadcasting and Film -
Thank you!
David Schaeffler
High School Teacher of Broadcasting and Film -
Hi David,
You are making extra work for yourself by converting all the footage. In Media Browser, you dig down through the folders to find the actual video clips on the hard drive, then select those clips and either drag them to the Project Bin or directly to the timeline, either works. You are then editing the native AVCHD clips. Unless your computer is horribly underpowered, you should have no issue editing those clips natively.
While it is true that ProRes clips are easier to play back, being less compressed, the trade-off is the time taken to transcode, and also that the ProRes clips will be many times larger than the originals, taking up a serious chunk of drive space. For short projects, maybe no big deal, but I often shot live events running a couple of hours, with two or more cameras, so those files would be massive as ProRes.
Thanks
Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers -
Thanks, Jeff…. I’ve read some postings where people are saying not to edit with MTS files. So as long as my computers can handle, will we be ok?
We have new imacs with 3 GHz Intel Core i5 with 16 GB 2667 MHz DDR4 and Radeon Pro 560X 4 GB
David Schaeffler
High School Teacher of Broadcasting and Film -
Don’t be too concerned with what some people said… TRY IT and see how it works on your system. I have always edited AVCHD natively and that was on 2 to 3-hour events with multiple cameras, on an old 2012 second-gen Core i7 machine. I have a much bigger computer now, but just saying the old one worked just fine for reference. A Core i7 is preferable for any HD editing work, but being newer machines they ought to work fine.
Never make extra work for yourself if you don’t have to. And you don’t want to fill up the drives with ProRes conversions either if not necessary. And speaking of drives, do you have a separate hard drive for video, or is “everything” running off the one system drive? Preference is to have a fast, dedicated drive for video and projects, but if you only have the system drive hopefully it is SSD which will make a difference.
Thanks
Jeff
Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers
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