Utility to merge DSLR clips?

[Dave Brandt]

Why not try to lay all your clips out in a project. Then save it and import it into your editing project as a clip?
Vegas treats nested projects just like clips so you can mark and region them as you please
Hope that helps

Dave Brandt
https://www.inputmedia.ie

Macbook Pro 17″ i7 2.2 8GB
iMac i7 2.8 16GB
FCP 7 FCPX Adobe CS 5.5

[Dave Haynie]

For HDV or most AVC formats, you can just concatenate the files. They’re all based on the MPEG-2 transport stream format, which is why this works. Of course, for AVC, you don’t want to go joining different formats.

For the rare camera that does MP4 file wrappers, the freeware tool YAMB works pretty well. YAMB also looks to work pretty well with the typical Canon AVC file, anyway (AVC in a Quicktime wrapper), though the output will be MP4, not MOV/Quicktime. They’re very similar; the MP4 file wrapper format was derived from Quicktime; most tools that support Quicktime also handle MP4 just dandy.

-Dave

[Tim Neighbors]

sounds great. How do I do I concatenate these avchd files (Canon T3i footage).
I tried dropping them on the timeline and rendering out an avc file with parameters that (to the best of my knowledge fit the source parameters)and it slowly starts recompressing the footage. and I tried rendering to a quicktime with MP4 encoding, and it just had an error and said it failed while dealing a codec.

I’m using Vegas Pro 10e. If this is the right approach, would you mind letting me know which template I should use …or what parameters should be set to?
thanks,
tim

[Dave Haynie]

I wasn’t recommending using Vegas just yet. If you want to merge the files without recompressing, Vegas ain’t the answer.

For simple concatenation, I just concatenate the files. Specifically, I open a cygwin shell, and type something like this:

> cat /cygdrive/j/00000.mts /cygdrive/j/00001.mts > /cygdrive/d/merged.mts

I think you can get something like that in a regular Windows shell doing this:

> copy J:/00000.mts+J:/00001.mts D:/merged.mts

Again, this will always work if you’re merging transport stream files, OR files broken at exact 4GB or 2GB boundaries. Another option is a little Windows shell extension from JD Design called “File Concatenate/Split Context Menu”. This lets you do the same thing in the Windows Explorer — select a few files, pull down the “Concatenate” menu, and this pops up a dialog that lets you order inputs and select an output file. See here: https://www.jddesign.co.uk/products/concat/concat-s.htm

The other option is to use a smarter file/merge utility. This is recommended for joining files that are logically split by the camcorder (you’ll notice that every file is a slightly different size if the camera is doing this, rather than all the files being 2GiB or 4GiB). I suggested YAMB (see https://yamb.unite-video.com/download.html), since it’s designed to processo MPEG-4 files, and it’s what I use for merging arbitary MP4 files.

-Dave

[Bouke Vahl]

Beside Daves options, there is also this:
https://www.videotoolshed.com/product/66/mp4-to-quicktime/3

Bouke

https://www.videotoolshed.com/
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