For those not familiar with Sony Vegas, it's thought to be the geek choice for video editing on Windows. It's much cheaper than the heavyweight solutions in the industry, but at the same time very powerful and robust. Let's have a look as to what's new in its 9th version.
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Member since:2005-06-28
The main problem with the Mac is that the Apple editors won't load AVCHD clips to be loaded "as is". They have to be imported from a camera, otherwise the editors refuse to load them.
With Linux, it's as bad: both ffmpeg and mencoder have massive bugs with interlaced h.264, and they think that a 60i video is actually 60p. This destroys motion. There are some long ways to deconstruct the streams to elementary streams and then feed them to ffmpeg, but these ways will take even more time than burning a DVD.
So, I'd suggest you install Windows and Vegas Platinum 9, and do all your conversions in it. I know that you might not want to touch Windows, but you can definitely have a PC station *just* for video editing. That's what I do too (my laptop is running either Linux or Mac but my video station runs Vista 64 because of the kinds of video utils available for it).
If you are not happy with that, you can just continue burning DVDs from within iDVD, and archive the original .mts files on DVD discs (as files) and hope for better support in the future.
Member since:2006-01-14
Member since:2006-11-12
I own a Canon HF11. I have found many ways to encode/view the AVCHD files in Linux, using mencoder, ffmpeg, mplayer and ffplay. I have also tried Handbrake and several of the front-ends to ffmpeg and mencoder, with some success.
For me, the two biggest problems were:
1. making a clean, quick "pull-up" (pull-down removal) of the Canon AVCHD 24p footage;
2. making sure that the transcoded footage will work with whatever NLE (non-linear editing software) is to be used.
There are lots of ways to "pull-up" the 24p Canon footage with mencoder. The quickest and easiest way that I found is this command:
This command makes a clean 24p Quicktime file from the AVCHD, with full 1920x1080 resolution, and it often encodes faster than realtime playback. The "-fps" argument must be set to "60000/1001" (or 59.94, or 60), because of the AVCHD framerate bug in mencoder (and in ffmpeg). Unfortunately, the audio sounds perceptibly different from the original.
Here is the same command using the H264 codec:
Two Final Cut Pro users have failed to put the encoded files on the FCP timeline (however, these results are not conclusive, because these FCP people were not very technically savy). The Perian utility http://perian.org/ might be required to use/view these files on Macs.
I also read somewhere that mencoder's lavf settings can make it difficult for some video players/NLEs to interpret the files.
Here is the pu-avchd "batch" script, that uses the first command above:
## pu-avchd -- remove the pulldown from a batch of Canon FP24, AVCHD files (.mts),
## and then convert them to Quicktime (mov).
##
## Please send any modified versions of this script to me at h_munster [at] gmx [dot] com.
## Thanks, -h_munster
for i in *mts;
do
ORIGINAL=`basename $i .mts`
FINAL=${ORIGINAL}.mov
## Mencoder command.
mencoder $i -o $FINAL -noskip -mc 0 -oac lavc -demuxer lavf -vf pullup,softskip -ovc lavc -lavcopts acodec=libfaac:abitrate=256:vcodec=mpeg4:vqscale=2:aspect=16/9 -of lavf -lavfopts format=mov -fps 60000/1001 -ofps 24000/1001
done
Of course, you should change the ".mts" references to your AVCHD file extension.
Here is a more time-consuming method to achieve the pull-up that definitely works on Macs with Perian loaded:
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showpost.php?s=ea20de2f2cb829f2821af...
For non-24P footage that doesn't need a pull-up, one could probably just change the output framerate ("-ofps") and remove the pull-up settings (pullup, softskip) to get good results. Trying a "non-lavf" demuxer/format might also be worthwhile with non-24P footage.
Furthermore, without the need for a pull-up, one can use ffmpeg or something like Handbrake.
Here is a post about the interactive hdffxvrt batch script, that uses ffmpeg:
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showpost.php?s=ea20de2f2cb829f2821af...
It takes longer to encode, but yields nice, deinterlaced video and audio, and one can select the final resolution.
Note that this script is set to work with the PAL camcorders (25fps). Here is a post about a modified version of hdffxvrt, set to work with 60i cameras:
http://marks.org/avchd/hdffxvrt-mov1-8-09
Here is the same modified script, set to create AVIs: http://marks.org/avchd/hdffxvrt-avi1-9-09
There is a much more involved script that uses xporthdmv, ldecod, yuv4mpeg and ffmpeg. It is described throughout this thread:
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?s=ea20de2f2cb829f2821...
To get AVCHD files to play in mplayer, I use:
A lot of experimentation and tweaking remains to be done in finding the best mencoder/ffmpeg settings for AVCHD. Hopefully, the framerate bug will be fixed soon.
Hope this helps.
Edited 2009-06-03 22:27 UTC
Member since:2005-06-28
Unfortunately, this is a pain in the bum solution. I have written a number of tutorials myself too about AVCHD pulldown removal http://eugenia.gnomefiles.org/2008/01/04/canon-avchd-24p-pulldown-r... but I am afraid the free tools are too much of a pain. If you want the job to be done _right_ and really fast, you might need to buy Cineform's NeoSCENE Windows utility for $130. It costs, but it does the job right.
Exporting in mpeg4 has major quality loss btw, you should try Huffyuv or Avid's DNxHD. Ffmpeg now supports DNxHD.
Member since:
2006-01-14
This is a little off topic. But, the mention of AVCHD and Vegas Pro is timely for me because I've been trying to figure out how get my clips off my camera for viewing.
I have an hg20 camera. I use a Mac and Linux. Simply viewing my video clips has proven to be a difficult task.
I can archive my video for long term / future use by imaging my camera's disk. But, I don't have a way to watch my clips without encoding them first, which takes a tremendous amount of resources. So, copying AVCHD to something like DVD is appealing to me. I'd like to be able to dump AVCHD files onto a DVD (like mp3's) and let the hardware decode it. But, that's proven to be not so straight forward either.
I'd be happy if I could just create DVD quality video from my clips. Currently, I've done it with iMovie and iDVD. But, it takes hours to create a few minutes of video and the quality sucks, too.
There must be an easier way.
Any suggestions?
Edited 2009-06-03 17:52 UTC