Lossless trimming/splitting/joining of AVCHD files

spk

Is this possible? If so, which software can do it? If not, which software/workflow comes closest?

(My preference is for open source software that can be used on a Mac, but this is not crucial.)

Hallvalla

I'm wondering if the new Adobe Prelude will do this...I also emailed ClipWrap a while back and they indicated they may consider adding something like this to ClipWrap - Preview, I/O points.

stoney

You could use ClipWrap to quickly rewrap MTS into MP4. Then use QT to do lossless trimming. But the trimmed clips failed to be transcoded by 5DtoRGB.

spk

I've just tried using FFmbc to rewrap MTS into MP4 and then using MPEG Streamclip for Mac* to trim the resulting file. However, the trimmed file plays back unreliably in QuickTime Player 10.0 (sometimes plays back OK; sometimes pauses or shows black screen) and also in VLC 1.1.11** (smearing/artefacting).

(* With Apple's QuickTime MPEG-2 Playback Component for Mac OS X already installed. ** I know, I ought to upgrade my copy of VLC...)

spk

@stonebat, MTS->ClipWrap-MOV->QuickTime Player 10.0->trimmed MOV seems to work for me; thank you.

For some reason, QuickTime Player 10.0 seems to be much happier trimming files rewrapped by ClipWrap than files rewrapped by FFmbc.

Anyhow, that's a trimming workflow established (and therefore potentially a splitting workflow too). So, anyone have a way to losslessly or near-losslessly join AVCHD files?

karl

avidemux-2.6 can do that and is available for several platforms for free at http://www.avidemux.org/

I've used the earlier version avidemux-2.4 a lot for this purpose with my older camera, but only the new and still experimental version 2.6 is said to support the AVCHD TS files generated by the GH2. Will try that myself, later.

stoney

@spk You could join them quite easily from OSX. Use "cat" command. I don't remember exact syntax. Google it.

karl

I just verified that avidemux-2.6 does precisely what you want for GH2 generated *.MTS files. I will certainly use that a lot, since cutting quickly the few seconds from each recorded file that are worth keeping and considering for a later rendering will save me a fortune in temporary storage space for the files... ;-)

I tried this under Linux, but avidemux generally works also under Mac OSX. This page here seems to be from a guy preparing avidemux executables for Mac OSX: http://avidemux.dyndns.org/index.php?lang=NL&subject=Avidemux&texttag=Avidemux It seems, though, that the executables he linked there are from a pretty old version of the source... maybe the forum at http://www.avidemux.org/smf/index.php?board=5.0 can tell you more about the current status of 2.6 on MacOS.

karl

@stonebat: For joining multiple *.MTS files from "spanning" or for joining files that were deliberately cut from one, before, the simple appending done by "cat" works fine.

But the Presentation Time Stamps and Decoding Time Stamps in the .MTS files won't be correct if you "cat" together two independendly recorded .MTS files. This might be tolerated by some player software (just displaying funny time positions), but I wouldn't count on post-production software to tolerate arbitrary PTS/DTS jumps in the transport stream.

(Remultiplexing multiple MTS files into one with a software dedicated for that purpose will get you correct time stamps.)

balazer

Existing topic on this: http://personal-view.com/talks/discussion/1641/trimming-clips-making-selections-in-.mts-files-and-exporting-them

Summarized in the FAQ: http://www.personal-view.com/faqs/gh2-usage/gh2-usage

spk

Thanks, @balazer. I'm sorry for not having spotted those before creating this thread. @Vitaly_Kiselev, please could you lock this thread?

(PS. Thank you to all the helpful commenters above, too!)

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