[Darrin Salt]

Stu,

I know where you are coming from, I’ve been there. You didn’t mentioned what NLE you are using but if it’s Vegas I can recommend my solution. I think John’s “option 2” is going to be the only way to go by default until (all) the NLE producers start including MP4 as an acceptable format.

I do dispute however that AVC encoded HD MP4’s are a “non-standard format” – they might be that for NLE use – but to be honest, until computing power moves on another notch I don’t see anything that is that compressed from being suitable for NLE without using an intermediate format.

It’s just another example of a new format which will take time to become widely adopted. Despite improvements in storage capacity, Flash memory devices are still small compared to HD or Tape capacities – leading vendors to seek the “ultimate compression” technology available.

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Darrin Salt
London, UK.

[Darrin Salt]

Hi Robert,

I did crack it, please see a few messages up:

https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/24/889709

I can tell you that the export from the Elecard convertor is full HD, so there is no loss of quality (save the original encoding into MP4 created by the camera).

The Elecard AVCHD convertor can output in several formats, but I found the .ts output the best for Vegas.

Finally, none of this will help if your PC just doesn’t have the grunt – I recommend at least a modern dual core processor, several GB of memory and a fast disk system. You didn’t mention what NLE you are using but if it’s Sony Vegas, I recommend having the preview mode switched to draft whilst editing, unless you have an extremely powerful PC, as “FULL” mode causes a pretty jerky preview. Regardless of this, the rendered output should be fine. I’ve also got a PS3 but haven’t experimented much with HD output rendering, most of my target audience is still DVD based. Good luck !

Darrin.

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Darrin Salt
London, UK.

[Darrin Salt]

Hi all.

Well I’ve solved my problem. I did try the Vasst products and although I had some success, it was a bit hit-and-miss (mostly due to the files and Vegas, not due to the Vasst products).

However, I then came across a (free/open source) package called MP4Cam2AVI. Note this is not the same as the shareware MP42AVI product. What this essentially does is convert the MP4 file into an AVI file. It does not re-compress the contents, these stay as AVC. Because no recompression takes place, it’s very quick. It also offers the option of converting many to one, so if you’ve a lot of incredibley small MP4 files from the same event (typically most of these camera’s create a new file every time the record button is pressed), it can create a composite AVI. This makes your NLE behave the way it would have if you’d be using a tape as your source material, with just one AVI per “tape” aka memory card. It appears to be only a PC product, but if you’re a Mac user with Parallels, you won’t be phased by that.

This isn’t the final part of the puzzle though, as Vegas won’t read the AVC encoded AVI’s (Sound only, video stream unsupported). However, lots of other converters now will and I selected Elecards AVCHD convertor. I did try Upshift, but that would not read the files. Elecard will read and convert, the major plus for me is that unlike many cheap convertors, it will output full HD .ts files from the input AVI’s. It also isn’t integrated into Vegas, which is a plus as I can run the conversions on another machine (It converts faster than I can edit, so that’s a bonus !).

To summarise, I take my MP4 AVC/AAC files, pre-convert them to AVI’s with MP4Cam2AVI and then finally convert with Elecard AVCHD convertor. The two stage process is a bit of a problem but the first is very quick and I get MPEG2 .ts files which work perfectly in Vegas. Just drop them straight to the timeline/trimmer.

Hopefully some of the HD convertor software writers will start handling MP4’s natively soon, especially because their is great confusion between AVC encoded HD and AVCHD !

—–
Darrin Salt
London, UK.

[Darrin Salt]

Just an update.

The VASST plug-in for Vegas does do the batch conversion, so I’m 90% of the way there – but Ultimate S Pro is such a sledgehammer to crack this nut. VASST’s upshift software would be much more appropriate – if only it read AVC’s which were MP4 encoded.

I’ve never encountered such compatability issues before when it comes to conversion – is this just because HD / AVC is fairly new ?

I spoke to the purchaser of the camera and they showed me articles which they read when choosing it which showed MTS as a poorly supported format and they assumed MP4 (supported by Apple et al) as an obvious choice. All I can say is MP4 might be OK for playback on dedicated hardware, but somethings got to give on the editing front.

Back to my original message, I could really do with a simple, cost effective batch convertor for HD (AVC) encoded MP4’s. Does anyone know of such a thing ?

—–
Darrin Salt
London, UK.

[Darrin Salt]

Thanks for the information. Forgive my hd-newbie error – I was told it was a HD camera which produced AVC encoded files. It’s clear now that an AVCHD camera (producing MTS files) is not the same as an HD Camera producing video files (in my case, I’ve been given MP4 files) which are AVC. Confused ? I was.

I’ll have a play with VASST software and let you know how I get on. This is a low budget production, a charity has given me the MP4 files which came from a Samsung HMX20C “Full HD” camera. Obviously consumer but nevertheless I wasn’t expecting to have to recode the files one-by-one (almost “by hand”). Yuk.

Regards,

—–
Darrin Salt
London, UK.