[Paulo Mateus]

right, windows…

but how come that she doesnt have audio in CS6? did she copy the whole file structure to her PC? AVCHD file structure has to be preserved, or else problems occur. All the folders and files have to be copied, not just the MTS ones (here, i just copy the whole card to the desktop)

well, in that case, shes pretty limited. But every PPro installation should come with Prelude.If not, find the installation discs and install. But more important than Prelude is Adobe Media Encoder, which actually does the transcoding for Prelude (Prelude sends it to ME, and then ME sends it back.A PPro installation without AME is useless, and that solves the poblem). Ingesting & transcoding the files to MP4 or MOV would be her best option, under win.

but if she doesnt have Prelude, well then the only thing i see is trying to extract the audio from the MTS files, and then work with the audio and video separately (she can always group/connect both tracks later). Personally, i try to avoid editing MTS files, due to glitches, and the fact many times a video take gets split into multiple MTS files. a nightmare)

or… she could try FFMBC, which says it rewraps AVCHD (bit.ly/1hTd28T)(bit.ly/1viZOvk)

or… she could ask a friend with a mac to let her convert the files using MediaConverter during lunchbreak

or… she could try MPEG_Streamclip’s windows version and try to convert the file. Dunno about this, use it more for DVD’s and stuff.

or… she could try the demo version of Corel VideoStudio Pro X7 (bit.ly/1iVkwrA), heard the app is powerful and does a good job at transcoding stuff (never tried it though)

hope it helps. thing is, everytime i see someone working with AVCHD on a windows machine, either they use the cameras provided software to transcode stuff, or they just use Prelude.

edit #1: remembered about 5DtoRGB, a app i have for the mac, but according to their site, they also have a win version. give it a try, does about the same as clipwrap (rarevision.com/5dtorgb/). their tagline says it all: “High-Quality AVC/H.264 Transcoding for HDSLR Users”

edit#2: if everything fails, try WinRewrap (bit.ly/1mEDMiI).

[Paulo Mateus]

Hi Sacha,
im on the same workflow (AVCHD & PPro/FCP7), and there are a few options:

1) drop the MTS file directly in PPro CS6, but sometimes i notice artifacts. Also, considering MTS works within a folder/file structure, dont know if that might cause problems during an edit. But Adobe says its ok.

2) or you can ingest the file with “Adobe Prelude CS6” and transcode it to ProRes (juts like in FCP), provided you have the “ProRes encoding presets” available from Adobe (adobe.ly/1vh4UZa). Its the same like FCP7’s “log & transfer”, the same results.

3) or you could just rewrap the video with “ClipWrap”, wont transcode or anything, maintains all the original quality, seems to play smoother (at least doesnt give me artifacts in VLC)

4) use “Media Converter” (bit.ly/S1h8FW), a batch converter that produces great results. Seems to be a free alternative to Clipwrap. Just make sure that you install the “Re-wrap AVCHD for Quicktime – uncompressed Audio” preset (availbale from the site), in order to rewrap the file.

as far as i can tell, these are the best options to work with AVCHD in PP/FCP.

If you have some time to kill and want to play Sherlock, install “MediaInfo” (bit.ly/1gbLQam; free version in downloads section) and compare the various file details of the transcoded/converted/rewrapped file to the details of the original file.

Cheers,
Paulo