Editing and shooting questions using a Panasonic HMC40

[Jeff Schroeder]

Dave,

1. Connect the camera and try the Device Explorer on the view menu.

2. Drag them to the timeline, if this does not work install the correct codec (usually from Panasonic) and try again.

3. Always build in HD, re-render to SD (wide) for your DVD using the DVD Architect templates.

4. Once it is rendered to SD it is SD. If it is too long and the file too big, use Mark’s DVD bitrate calculator to get the best VBR settings to put into your render.

5. I think there is a free render-for-youtube extension somewhere. Maybe vegasaur? (Mike would know.)

6. I don’t even bother with 1280×720, I always shoot in 1920×1080 regardless of what I’m shooting.

That’s just me, John Rofrano is mush better trained at this stuff, he may have better advise.

Good luck,

Jeff

2-Xeon X5680 @ 3.33 MSI Mobo 48GB DDR3 GTX 580 3072MB 16TB Attached Storage Win7 Vegas 11 x64

[Dave Haynie]

[Dave Petteruto] “1. What is the best way to copy the video files from the video camera to the computer?”

Being an expert computer and digital video guy, I basically just concatenate sequential segments from the SD card to my HDD. That works just dandy, leaves no gaps. But the Vegas Device Explorer is probably the current “standard” way of importing files these days, and it works, too.

[Dave Petteruto] “2. Once the video files are on the computer can I import them right into Vegas for editing or do I need to convert them to another format?
“

The HMC40 shoots in bog standard AVCHD format, which is MPEG-4 AVC (aka H.264, aka MPEG-4 Part 10) video with SMPTE AC-3 (aka Dolby Digital) audio in an MPEG-2 Transport Stream file wrapper. This is directly supported by Vegas since at least Vegas 9, and pretty much every other modern NLE.

[Dave Petteruto] “3. I burn a lot of my projects to DVD, should I build my Vegas projects in HD and render for DVD using SD render settings?”

Always do your editing in HD. Well, almost always.. if you have a slow PC, you may want to use an SD video proxy for editing (manually, or via a tool like GearShift). But do the editing work such that you can render to HD. This isn’t going to work on a DVD, but you can render HD for online, for Blu-ray (someday, if not necessarily right now), and if you have a Blu-ray player and a short-enough project, you can render to AVCHD DVDs (though not from DVD Architect) as a way to make Blu-ray like video discs without a BD writer. In short, keeping in HD keeps your options open.

[Dave Petteruto] “4. If I render the HD video for DVD can I still get about the same amount of video run time on a DVD or will the file size be much larger than SD renders?
“

You can’t render in HD for a “DVD-Video” format on DVD. That’s 720×480 NTSC, 24p or 60i, MPEG-2. Pretty much your options (well, there are two lower resolution video modes). You can create an AVCHD formatted video on a red laser DVD that will play in nearly every Blu-ray player, but not on DVD players. You can of course simply put HD files on a DVD, and there are other, even more esoteric HD formats possible on a DVD (I used to make Microsoft WMV/HD discs, I even had a red laser player that played them in HD, but that was too much work, since you had to hack the HTML and Javascript by hand, there were no authoring tools).

[Dave Petteruto] “5. For Youtube (in HD) what is the best way to render? “

Anything that doesn’t have to be interlaced shouldn’t be. YouTube will accept practically anything these days, but it’ll transcode to whatever it feels like, basically. That’s usually 24p or 30p. You could sent it 1080/60i or 720/60p directly from the camera and it would probably take it (though curiously, if you send H.264/MPEG-4/AVC, it requires the whole video before it starts processing, if you send an MPEG-2 TS file with MPEG-2 video, it starts processing as it’s uploading).

[Dave Petteruto] “6. I shoot a lot of football at night. On the camera what video format would be recommended 720 or 1080?
“

With sufficient lightly, sports video nearly always looks much better in 720p than 1080i. The very reason there IS a 720p format is that ESPN, which is of course owned by ABC, which is of course owned in turned by the mighty Disney Co, lobbied this during the days of HDTV development and the “Grand Alliance”. I shot all of my soccer video over the last two and a half years (since I bought my HMC40) in 720p,
and it was the right decision.

For a DVD target, you absolutely don’t care, if that’s your only target. Both 1080i and 720p will be 480p on the DVD, and they’ll look identical. Online, your 1080i will have blurring from de-interlacing, but it’ll result in a 1080/30p video with some blurring. Your 720/60p video will probably be reduced to 720/30p, unless YouTube has changed recently. That will probably look better on high motion than 1080/60i converted.

And there’s the other reason you like 720/60p for sports: AVC encoding. The whole deal with AVC, like MPEG-2 and other modern video CODECs, is that you shoot one I-Frame (independent video frame, like a JPEG) and then use motion estimation and other magic to store a bunch (maybe 14 or more) of “P” (Predictive) and “B” (Bidirectionally Predictive) frames. They store the changes between frames as motion vectors, then just the differences between that predicted frame and the real one. So it’s much, much smaller. But if you have too much motion, frame to frame, it starts to get bad.

You’ve probably seen this on SD video… in high motion, you start to see blockiness. Those are the MPEG-2 macroblocks (all of these video encoding mechanisms break things up into bite-sized pieces, such as 16×16 blocks) becoming visible, because the compression algorithm has to chop out too much, due to the very large changes, frame to frame.

So, back to 720p.. all thing being equal, the change from one frame to another is half at 60p than it would be at 30p (and, for various reasons, it’s similar for 60i). So you get half of the high-speed
breakdown you would with 60i, or you get to shoot twice the speed … however you like to think of it.

I recommend testing… shoot a scrimmage, some at 720p, some at 1080i, see which one you like better. View on an HDTV, view on a PC, view uploaded to YouTube. You’ll very likely discover that, for high speed sports, 720/60p is the better format.

-Dave

[Dave Petteruto]

Thanks for the info guys–very much appreciated.

Thanks
Dave P.

Intel I7 950, 12GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 SE, Vegas Pro 10 (32bit/64bit), Windows 7 Pro 64bit, LG WH10LS30 10X Bluray Burner.

[Joshua Engel]

One more item of note that you’ll want to be aware of if you’re shooting long (LOOOONG) shots which if you’re filming football you might end up doing. There is a bit of an odd quirk that happens at least with the HMC40, it splits the files with each file being I believe 2 GB in size. Now if you go into your editing software and notice that there is a hiccup or a bit of a ‘dropout’ or stutter that happens, it’s likely because of these file splits. It’s only because the video and matching audio are on separate sides of the split.

If you’re fine with a little windows command line, there’s a simple way to join all these files together. Open up a windows terminal, change directory to where all your .MTS files are, and you can run this command to join them all into one file called output.MTS.

copy /b .*MTS .OutputFile.MTS

(/b means binary copy, the .*MTS defines the input as all files ending in .MTS, and .OutputFile.MTS defines the output file name for all the individual MTS files to join into)

Now there are other utilities to join the files, I do believe, and some video editing software will handle those ‘splits’ in the files gracefully. However if you run into any issues, just join them all together into one big file and it should solve the mystery and problems associated with shooting long shots.

[Dave Haynie]

[Joshua Engel] “One more item of note that you’ll want to be aware of if you’re shooting long (LOOOONG) shots which if you’re filming football you might end up doing”

Not all that long.. at the peak of 21Mb/s average (24Mb/s peak) in PH mode, you eat about 10GB per hour. I know, shooting four years of JV and Varsity Girls Soccer, it’s always 2 files per half.

[Joshua Engel] “There is a bit of an odd quirk that happens at least with the HMC40, it splits the files with each file being I believe 2 GB in size. “

It’s a break at 4GB, not 2GB, and it’s S.O.P. for any camcorder using FAT32 as a file system (and plenty that have updated their SD card support for exFAT and SDXC, but still impose the 4GB limit, even if it’s not an issue in exFAT).

The break doesn’t occur on clean boundaries. So yeah, you can as Joshua recommends here, simply concatenate the sequential files. Of course, you do have to be careful about that. In Vegas, you can use the View/Device Explorer option to find your camcorder… this is wise to the ways of AVCHD splits, and will deliver single large files when imported to an NTFS or other 64-bit file system.

-Dave

[Joshua Engel]

Yes, I should have got the 4GB file correct. I should have my computer science degree revoked.

Thanks for cleaning up my post. I didn’t even know I could use Vegas to pull in a single large file, I always end up just concatenating.

Whenever I see new users especially with the HMC40 my first reaction is to always tell them about the file splits. Your software is not broken and your camera is recording everything, and there is no drop out.

[Jeff Schroeder]

We have been dealing with the file split issue about 4-1/2 years when we got our first hard-drive camera. The concatenation thing is a real handy tip. Thanks.

Jeff

2-Xeon X5680 @ 3.33 MSI Mobo 48GB DDR3 GTX 580 3072MB 16TB Attached Storage Win7 Vegas 11 x64

[Dave Haynie]

[Joshua Engel] “Yes, I should have got the 4GB file correct. I should have my computer science degree revoked.”

Well, you never know. The limit sometimes is 2GB for these things, when the developers didn’t think ahead enough and enforce the use of unsigned 32-bit ints for everything. I just bump up against this so much these days, between the HMC40, the TM700, and the Canon 60D, it’s all I see when I close my eyes 🙂

[Joshua Engel] “Whenever I see new users especially with the HMC40 my first reaction is to always tell them about the file splits. Your software is not broken and your camera is recording everything, and there is no drop out.”

Ditto. The first thing I usually do is pop open a Cygwin shell, and do a cat *.mts >/cygdrive/d/somewhere_else/biggie.mts, that kind of thing. I didn’t know about the Device Explorer until someone pointed it out here, but it’s handy. Still doesn’t grok TM700 24p-on-60i video, but it will handle multiple merged segments all at once, which doesn’t suck. And this is a much better “non-geek” option to steer folks toward.

-Dave

[Dave Petteruto]

Update and a couple of questions for Dave or whomever cares to input.

I’ve been shooting some football at 720/60p and it’s been coming out pretty good. The 1080 was definitely much more blurry in the motion of the video.

Question 1–One thing I notice is that the quality of the preview seen through the eye-piece is not nearly the quality that I was getting with my old Sony vx2000. It seems to be somewhat grainy and not nearly as sharp or bright as the Sony. Does this seem right? I adjusted the brightness and that did make it better.

Question 2–For getting the video files onto my computer why can’t I put the card into my computer and copy the files off of it to the computer hard drive? 99% of my clips are less than 5 minutes in length.

Thanks
Dave P.

Intel I7 950, 12GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 SE, Vegas Pro 10 (32bit/64bit), Windows 7 Pro 64bit, LG WH10LS30 10X Bluray Burner.

[Dave Haynie]

[Dave Petteruto] “I’ve been shooting some football at 720/60p and it’s been coming out pretty good. The 1080 was definitely much more blurry in the motion of the video.”

Yup… you’re sampling at twice the rate, effectively. So there’s less motion blur in each frame, and also, fewer changes frame to frame, twice as many I-Frames per second.. things that make AVC encoders happy.

[Dave Petteruto] “Question 1–One thing I notice is that the quality of the preview seen through the eye-piece is not nearly the quality that I was getting with my old Sony vx2000. It seems to be somewhat grainy and not nearly as sharp or bright as the Sony. Does this seem right? I adjusted the brightness and that did make it better.”

Most electronic viewfinders are not great… and Panasonic’s no leader in this area. The HMC40 viewfinder is pretty low resolution, about half the rez of the flip-out screen. One reason I guess it’s not a $3000 camcorder, though I’ve used some $3000+ camcorders with questionable viewfinders. The only time I’ve used the viewfinder for sports was during a rain (with the camera in a bag)… once you get used to shooting with the screen (in the old still camera days, we called that a “sportsfinder”), you’ll appreciate the fact that you can see action that’s out of the video field at the same time.

[Dave Petteruto] “Question 2–For getting the video files onto my computer why can’t I put the card into my computer and copy the files off of it to the computer hard drive? 99% of my clips are less than 5 minutes in length.”

You can. The SD card will be formatted for AVCHD, which is a spin-off of the Blu-ray format. So you have to dig down to find the files, but they’re there. Look in PRIVATEAVCHDBDMVSTREAM, and you’ll find all your clips stored as .MTS (MPEG-2 Transport stream, AVC video, AC-3 audio) files. You can drop these directly into Vegas.

The only issue is when you have 4GB files. The HMC40, like most AVCHD cameras, will break the file into 4GB chunks, and not necessarily in a friendly way. Concatenating sequential files avoids any gaps in-between them; Vegas can do this automatically using the Device Explorer (off the View Menu for some reason).

-Dave