There is no good editing software that will operate on MTS files without recompressing. If you want to do anything more complicated than trimming some footage from the beginning and end of a clip, you'll just have to live with the lossy recompression and conversion that NLE software does. (or uses a lossless format, which creates huge files that probably can't even be played without specialized hardware) If your output is the same resolution as the input and you compress to a high enough bit rate, the loss will not be noticeable. Almost every great video you've seen from the GH2 was made this way.

Best workflow I've found so far on OS X 10.6.8 is, as you can see from my spreadsheet linked above, along these lines:

00001.mts -> 00001.mov (via Clipwrap, set to rewrap & to preserve timestamps) ->00001.mov (trimmed using QuickTime Player)

The snag with this approach is that QuickTime Player completely overwrites the existing 00001.mov, which means that the ctime (the timestamp indicating when the file was created) of the file gets set to the time the trimmed file was saved, instead of being kept at the time the original video was shot.

Therefore, I've created a little Ruby script called touchstamp that can be used to extract the original ctime from the .mov file's metadata and write it to the file so that the ctime is once again correct. The idea is that having rewrapped a directory full of .mts files and having also trimmed any of the resulting files that needed trimming, the script can be executed once in that directory and it will ensure all the .mov files' ctimes are correct.

No guarantees it will work for you, but it works for me :) You can find it here: https://github.com/sampablokuper/touchstamp

@markmark1 No idea. Google it.

@spk Good. ClipWrap/QT rule.

@stonebat

I got a missing codec error when trying to open a flowmotion file in QT10

@hireslofi thank you, I also have a Quadro 2000

@MrEdd the yellow line in Premiere just means that it might not be playable in real time. Do you have a CUDA enabled GPU? If so Premiere will play back yellow line material fine. If not it may struggle. I import MTS and the yellow line shows but it plays back perfectly with nVidia Quadro 2000.

I use Resolume Avenue 3.3.1 and by setting in and out points, I convert the GH2 MTS files to DVX with Aunsoft Video Converter. Had no problem at all. and why do you need a native AVCHD trimmer if you'd convert to DVX

@MrEdd, I use Vegas, which happily takes HBR files and requires no extra rendering for them (beyond what any other progressive clip would require).

Frankly I'm not clear on what all of this benign PsF vs. malignant PsF business is. PsF does not simply mean that the video is being disguised as interlaced, as that author says. PsF means that the video has been *converted* to interlaced, and delivered in an interlaced encoding, albeit in such a way that the original progressive video can be recovered. I take it that in the case of benign PsF, software applications have a way of knowing that they are looking at PsF. But no one has said how they can know, and it's not clear that what they are doing generalizes across all different source videos correctly.

Mac OS X users:

I emailed Colin with ClipWrap about including trimming on a future version - he said it is being considered for version 3.0. Fingers crossed.

Thanks, @valdi99. I tried Final Mate, and the output files play but they crash Sony Vegas.

BTW I updated my earlier post to say that Smart Cutter now seems to work.

I just tried Smart Cutter on Gh2 mts, worked like a charm. Guess since the file is gop 1 there will be no degradation at beginning and end. Great tool for killing garbage before going into PP.

I had tried Smart Cutter on GH1 files a while back, and it always crashed. The new version seems to be improved, working on my GH1 and GH2 files. I still don't trust it enough to not keep the source files. I trust tsMuxeR a bit more.