Importing and working with MTS files from Panasonic AG-AF100

[Petros Kolyvas]

Hi Wes,

Unfortunately, all that metadata does travel in the card structure. What that means is the structures must be maintained if you want anything other than the video clips themeselves.

This includes, but is not limited to: timecode, spanning data (for clips that cross the filesystem size limit), and any metadata you may have programmed into the camera.

There is a massive caveat with Premiere: Dublin core is currently broken so you can’t do anything with the AVCCAM metadata anyway. For now at least.

These limitations are for all AVCCAM products, not simply the AF100. I’ve repeatedly petitioned Panasonic to stop the non-descriptive naming madness with AVCCAM products but it doesn’t seem anyone is listening.

Regarding portability: you can just use the MTS files. But without metadata all clips will start at 00:00:00:00 and they wont span. However if neither of those two caveats bother you then rename and copy away!

It would be really nice if Premiere would include a much more robust media manager (CS6?) that would help keep these file-related issues at bay.

We’ve had an AF100 since launch and have been using it with Premiere exclusively since July so while I’m happy to share anything I’ve learnedly thus far, I’m also anxious to hear about what others are doing!

🙂

PK

—
There is no intuitive interface, not even the nipple. It’s all learned. – Bruce Ediger

[Wes Browning]

I’m considering moving to ClipWrap as a big part of my workflow. I’ve used it to rewrap the MTS files/folders and it seems to keep everything intact. And yes, I do have many spanning clips, as much of my work involves long interviews without breaks. It seems that ClipWrap outputs these wrapped files as H264 Quicktime files, which are great for me since they offer portability (ie. getting rid of the AF100 folder nightmare). This also allows me to keep these wrapped H264 files as part of my footage library and convert to ProRes 422 LT as I need them for projects. Any reason why wrapping them in ClipWrap, then later converting those wrapped files to ProRes 422 LT would throw up any red flags concerning quality loss?

[Petros Kolyvas]

[Wes Browning] “Any reason why wrapping them in ClipWrap, then later converting those wrapped files to ProRes 422 LT would throw up any red flags concerning quality loss?”

Not that I can think of. I’ve had lots of trouble with ClipWrap and clip spanning though so while we have a seat of it, I’ve never used for anything other than an emergency. I think I will revisit this position (and Clipwrap.)

—
There is no intuitive interface, not even the nipple. It’s all learned. – Bruce Ediger

[Petros Kolyvas]

I tested out Clipwrap and I’d have to agree with you. It makes self-contained files, works with spanning and maintains time-code, all in a re-namable MOV-contained file setup.

We’ve had a license for a seat of Clipwrap for over a year and I haven’t thought to try it out for this purpose.

I tested the clips in Premiere and they seem to behave just as well.

Thank you!

—
There is no intuitive interface, not even the nipple. It’s all learned. – Bruce Ediger

[Petros Kolyvas]

I just wanted to follow up on this post for anyone interested…

We revisited Clipwrap and discovered two things:

a) The folks at Divergent are fantastic and stand behind a great product.

b) Premiere suffers from massive performance issues (as a result of what can only be handing off the media for playback via Quicktime) when MTS clips from our AF100 are wrapped in an MOV container (not a problem with Clipwrap but rather the workflow.) This same issue plagues clips wrapped using Panasonic’s own AVCCAM importer into FCP(Pre-X) so I wouldn’t blame Clipwrap here.

Panasonic definitely made some poor descisions with the AVCCAM structure and file format – something a continuous counter alone would fix!

Even more odd is that I heard directly from Divergent Media that the MTS files themselves do actually contain the camera’s timecode so technically there should be a way to rename the files without loosing the data – but there doesn’t seem to be at this juncture. Future Clipwrap feature?

Onward video soldiers….

—
There is no intuitive interface, not even the nipple. It’s all learned. – Bruce Ediger

[Dorit Grunberger]

So if I get Clip Wrap, I can take the silly .mts files out of the stupid folder system, have them appear as .movs, transcode to ProRes in FCP 7.0.3 and they will have maintained their original timecode meta data?
Or did I misunderstand?

Thanks in advance for clarifying

Thanks in advance,
Dorit

[Wes Browning]

ClipWrap won’t modify or require you to move your folder structure. What it will do is take all the metadata (including timecode) and create a new file with all that data. The resulting file is a Quicktime (.mov) file. You can take those files into FCP and transcode them there if you like, or you might find it useful to go straight from the AF100’s folder system and transcode it to ProRes within ClipWrap.

[Dorit Grunberger]

Regarding this issue, how much bigger than the .mts files are the ClipWrap files and is it possible to edit ClipWrap .mov files in FCP 7 without transcoding to ProRes? I ask this because the transcoding inflates the files almost 10 fold!! Is there any way around it?
A friend who owns a PMW-EX3 gets great ingested XDCAM footage at a fraction of the size…

Thanks in advance,
Dorit

[Chris King]

If you wanna edit single mts files with Adobe Premiere Pro without whole file structure of the camera, you will need to convert MTS files to a MPEG-2 or other Premiere Pro natively supported format. Or just connect your cam to computer to import the whole file structure. Premiere Pro can natively recognize and ingest the MTS files.

https://video-playback-tips.com/