m2Ts Files on MAC

[Elijah Lynn]

You and I both! I amazed at Apples lack of acknowledgment towards this issue. They think you just have massive storage arrays laying around to transcode this footage to AIC or Apple ProRes. I think they forget that one of the reasons people are going avchd in the first place is because of how efficient it compresses and the lower disk space usage than the competing codecs.

Amazing that they sell 8 core Macs and of all the computers that could properly handle a few of these streams my 2 core pc Laptop can handle it better than their 8 core Mac Pro.

Hopefully, they are reading these forums. They better get moving.

[Andy Mees]

Probably worth acknowledging that there are no professional AVCHD cameras on the market (that I know of). AVCHD is not a professional acquisition format and as such it doesn’t receive Apple’s immediate attention when working on their professional NLE products. People are going AVCHD because consumer camera’s are going AVCHD, not because of what a wonderful codec it is. As the consumer world moves to tapeless acquisition it provides a means to record large amounts of quasi-HD footage at varying levels of heavy compression on relatively small hard discs, and as such, not surprisingly, its an increasingly pervasive consumer format. That said, of course it would be useful for a lot of FCP’s user base (a good percentage of those million users are just consumers after all) and they surely don;t want to lose any of their users, non-professional or not. For me, I would be (probably will be) extremely disappointed if and when FCP 7’s / QT 8’s “major new feature” is native support of this consumer codec, instead of the host of things that we really need fixing, updating, implementing.

OK … got my flame suit on (the one with ELITIST emblazoned boldly across the ass) so have at. But nya nya nya, you’ll never get me way up here on my high horse 🙂

Andy

[Tom Wolsky]

If you knew anything about codecs and compression you would know that the formats being used my camera manufacturers these days are developments of delivery formats. Sure they can make formats really small, and produce decent pictures that vaguely resemble HD, but they’re uneditable. They’re garbage formats that compress video across multiple frames; all they care is that they can market it and get people to buy it. They don’t care if you can’t work with it. If you would like to edit with a five frame or 15 frame leeway, if that’s good enough for you, close enough for your work then sure, you can work with MPEG codecs. For most editors the difference between two frames is the difference between right and wrong. To do that you need codecs and formats that compress to and can be cut on any individual frame. Sure some applications will edit it, just as FCP can edit HDV, but you pay a major penalty on rendering and on conforming at the back end.

All the best,

Tom

Class on Demand DVDs “Complete Training for FCP6,” “Basic Training for FCS2” and “Final Cut Express Made Easy”
Author: “Final Cut Pro 5 Editing Essentials” and “Final Cut Express 4 Editing Workshop”

[Tom Wolsky]

You should get your Focus drive upgraded if you haven’t done it already. There is a menu setting that allows the drive to record the HDV material in QuickTime, which can be edited natively in FCP.

All the best,

Tom

Class on Demand DVDs “Complete Training for FCP6,” “Basic Training for FCS2” and “Final Cut Express Made Easy”
Author: “Final Cut Pro 5 Editing Essentials” and “Final Cut Express 4 Editing Workshop”

[Andy Mees]

Elijah

ClipWrap is for rewrapping HDV encoded clips that are recorded as M2T files, not for AVCHD encoded clips.
If you want AVCHD support you need to be looking at VideoPier HD

Cheers
Andy

[Andy Mees]

ClipWrap should work for you Carlo
https://www.clipwrap.com

[Andy Mees]

> They think you just have massive storage arrays laying around to transcode this footage to AIC or Apple ProRes

Most pro’s and semi pro’s working in tis industry DO have large and fast storage systems … but I’m sensing knowing that won’t help you :/ you might want to consider investing in the latest version of Toast. That will let you transcode your AVCHD footage to any codec your Quicktime installation supports, so instead of AIC or ProRes you could try a more compressed HD codec like DVCPro HD

[Stace Carter]

I’m just going to jump in with related but unhelpful bitching on this one. We have a Panasonic AG-HMC70P (painfully prosumer) and Log and Capture works – but I have to break down my takes to smaller-than-preferred clips, which is a huge PITA because we do a lot of Doc work.

I actually couldn’t open the MTS file in MPEG Streamclip. Am I missing a Codec for that?

[Tom Fuldner]

Just tried ClipWrap after encountering the same problem from StreamClip. It works! That’s what counts. Thanks for the tip.

Tom F.
Raleigh, NC

[Paulo Debenest]

First of all, thank you all for the tips and information on this topic.

I’ve been trying to import m2ts files to an iMac. My final goal was to make a DVD with those files, with minimum editing.

I’m not reading the m2ts files from the camera anymore. I copied the files in a portable hard disk. By the way, they were taken with Panasonic’s Lumix GF1.

MPEG Streamclip didn’t work (apparently it reads m2t, but not m2ts files). ClipWrap worked only for relatively small files (anything over 800MB would cause the program to crash).

Finally, iSky DVD Creator did the trick!
https://www.iskysoft.com/user-guide/dvd-creator-mac.html
It’s a quite powerful DVD burner, with very basic editing options included. If anyone only needs to make a DVD with those nasty m2ts files, this could be an option. This doesn’t apply to professional editing with FCP, but I hope it can be useful anyway.