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Working with naming redundancy of MTS files
Hi creative cow forum,
I am new to working with MTS files in Premiere and have a few questions about the proper workflow. I would be very grateful for any wisdom.
first off background on the project:
– We have .mts files from several different consumer Vixia cameras
– The cameras used the same naming convention for each card. (starting with 000.mts working its way up). These means we have several different .mts files, with the same name.
– The file structures were copied over directly from the cards, and therefore unchanged. However, I still can’t work with the metadata for some of the clips… and therefore suspect i need to transcode some of them.My Questions:
1. Is it a problem that there is a redundancy in the naming of the .mts files, and that i will have several clips in the project with the same name? All the clips are organized into a folder structure based on date and roll, so i’m not worried about the name redundancy when i’m actually editing. I am worried that if the media gets disconnected Adobe won’t know which clip to look for, and may try to reconnect the wrong clip with the same name. Does Adobe reconnect based only of file name, or does it also look at the path?
I’m scared if i change the file name, it will be hard to make sure the file name is changed across the folder structure, and therefore the native structure could be corrupted.
What is a best practice workflow for working with .mts files with the same name in adobe?
2. Alot of the footage is shot by non-professionals, who didn’t know to break up clips. Therefore, we have a lot of “spanned” .mts files. is there any solution to spanned files? I’ve read in a previous forum that there is not, and that the only way to avoid the issue is to transcode. Is that information still true?
3. If i do have to transcode, what is the recommended codec? I usually go with prores 4444, but that codec’s file size is way too big for the amount of footage we have to go through. Any suggestions?
I would be so grateful if anyone can help on these questions!!
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4 Replies
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[charlotte kaufman] “My Questions:
1. Is it a problem that there is a redundancy in the naming of the .mts files, and that i will have several clips in the project with the same name? All the clips are organized into a folder structure based on date and roll, so i’m not worried about the name redundancy when i’m actually editing. I am worried that if the media gets disconnected Adobe won’t know which clip to look for, and may try to reconnect the wrong clip with the same name. Does Adobe reconnect based only of file name, or does it also look at the path? “
-In my limited experience PPro only looks at the name, not the path (as FCP7 did). I did a write up here: https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/3/942907#942907 of my workaround to prep clips prior to import via the media browser.
[charlotte kaufman] “2. Alot of the footage is shot by non-professionals, who didn’t know to break up clips. Therefore, we have a lot of “spanned” .mts files. is there any solution to spanned files? I’ve read in a previous forum that there is not, and that the only way to avoid the issue is to transcode. Is that information still true? “
-I believe Clipwrap 2 (Mac) can rewrap, without transcoding, your spanned files into 1 file. I haven’t tried using the rewrapped files in PPro though.
Please post back with what worked for you in the end.
Phillip Todd
Cinematographer -
How did it work out Charlotte?
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Hi Phillip,
Thank you very much for taking the time to answer my questions! I am going to test out your strategy on a few of my .mts files. Before I do that, I have a question about name changer. I tried renaming the .mts files with name changer before, but i found that once i did that, i no longer had access to changing the clips meta-data. Did you find the same issue? Adobe could read the clips, but if i wanted to work with their meta-data, I wasn’t able to.
Thank you again for taking the time to read my post! I really appreciate it!
best,
charlotte -
[charlotte kaufman] “but i found that once i did that, i no longer had access to changing the clips meta-data. Did you find the same issue?”
I have not gotten into metadata yet, but I’d like to, it’s on my to do list.
I just checked on my edit machine. Yes my XMP metadata fields are ineditible and there are no .xmp files created next to the original material as I have seen before.
I found this info which goes deeper but is inconclusive: https://forums.adobe.com/message/5306999
I suspect changing the AVCHD file folders to lowercase breaks XMP for PPro CS6.
Maybe another Cow Member can help us out?
Phillip Todd
Cinematographer
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