marcelfahle.com

As some of you maybe know, I’m a huge fan of traveling and most of the stuff I see on my trips, I try to capture with my video camera, which is great fun for me.
But when it comes to editing, I had a few problems to solve, to find the best possible workflow to get something cool out of my raw footage.

The best workflow I had so far, was with my simple DV Camera from Panasonic. There are millions of tools out there for getting the footage from tape to harddisk. The rest is just really fast drag’n drop editing in Adobe Premiere or any other video editing software on the market. Life was good.

But then I’ve entered the HighDef sector in early 2007 with the, at this time first consumer Full-HD camera, JVC Everio GZ-HD7. Totally impressed by the picture quality I looked forward to its first real mission: a trip to Stockholm, which was fun - editing the footage was not.
The Everio stores the video data in files with .TOD extension. TO-what? Never heard of that, but JVC said, working with these files is not a big deal. I’m sure, with the bundled “travel-video-with-1-click-plus-burning-and-labeling”-software it’s really not a big deal, but serious “competitors” like Premiere or Final Cut do have problems opening those files. There are a couple possible workflows to get the files into the editor of your choice, but all of them are solutions where you first have to transcode the files to a more suitable file format or container. So, as you might imagine, editing was not as fun as it has been before.

After a lot of research, I finally found MainConcepts MPEG Pro HD Plug-In for Premiere (just Windows - 400 frickin’ bucks!), which finally enabled Premiere to edit the files natively. Very cool in theory, but a pain in the ass when actually doing it. Editing was slow, Premiere often hung up and when it came to exporting to a HighDef Output, it always hung up or freezed as well.
By the way: I’ve got no high-end windows computer, but it’s not slow also: A 2.6 Ghz Intel QuadCore with 4 gigs of RAM.

Anyway, for a couple of other reasons, I’ve decided to switch to another camera, the Sony HDR-SR12. Besides of a million-times better image stabilizer, I expected a more commonly file format (AVCHD) and a better workflow.
The image stabilizer is Killer and the overall functionality and handling of the cam is better as well - an awesome camcorder! But again, the file format is driving me nuts. While now on a shiny new Mac pro, I gave Final Cut Express a shot and tried to import the M2TS files from a local harddrive - not possible! Here is why: you have to serve Final Cut either the camera connected to USB or, at least the proper file structure from the camera. The funny thing is, I’m talking here of a project I’ve imported to my local harddrive using the bundled importing tool from Sony. Apparently not enough for Final Cut Express or even iMovie 08 (tried that as well). I’m sure, if you’ll conenct the camera directly it’ll work great - but in my case just not possible because there is already new stuff on my cameras harddisk and the M2TS files are all I have. I would be glad if somebody could explain me, why it’s handled like this. Where is the echnical difference?

Anyway, that means again: transcoding first. Crap!
But after some more research I found a good tool to do the job: MPEG Streamclip. I takes all my files without complaining. No matter if .TOD or .M2TS, everything just works. With MPEG Streamclip I now transcode all the stuff I have to MP4 files with Apples Intermediate Codec. Surprisingly, this goes amazingly fast on my 8-Core 3.0 Ghz machine 4-times realtime, very cool.

So, bottom line is: If you have some problems with brandnew-HighDef-h.264-whatsoever files coming from your brand new gadget, give MPEG Streamclip a shot, it ensures to convert your footage to a “more suitable” file format. It is free and comes for Mac and Windows, so the choice is yours.

If you wanna check some of my videos, travelbert.com is a good start. One of my latest videos you’ll find here (not finished).

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