Editing GH2 footage in CS6

[Kasper Mols]

Hi guys,

I just picked up my brand new GH2 and I have been loving it since.

The only problem I face is, when importing my AVCHD footage in Premiere pro, the video is allright, but the audio is not included (and yes, it did record it). There is just no audio clip.

Does anyone know how to solve this?

[Kasper Mols]

I found a solution myself. By importing the footage to my MacBook using iPhoto, it automaticly encodes my footage to editable MOV files. I checked and the filesize of the MTS and MOV files were similar (the MOV was just a tad bigger)

Is this a good method, or will I lose quality with this?

[Mondo]

Check this article out. very helpful Or you could import with 5DtoRGB. Info on that program below as well.

http://www.eoshd.com/content/8612/mac-avchd-gamma-issues-the-fix

http://www.eoshd.com/content/8076/how-mac-osx-still-screws-your-gh2-fs100-nex-footage-a-must-read

[see ya]

I'd just remux rather than reencode, there's a tool called Clipwrap which will do the remux, made reference to in the links mentioned above.

[Kasper Mols]

So 5DtoRGB is basicly the only way to go?

[Francisco Rios]

Kasper, do you have a trial version?
Only with the paid version you got full premiere CS6 with all posible sequences settings that can handle avchd.
I like to use 5dtoRGB. It's take a lot of time but is the best transcode to prores for GH2.
Best regards.

[see ya]

No 5DToRGB is not the 'only' way, transcoding GH2 AVCHD to ProRes is pointless for CS6.

Mac or PC?

ffmpeg for free also available for mac to do quick remux into MOV container.

[url="http://ffmpeg.org/download.html"]http://ffmpeg.org/download.html[/url]

Simple commandline or batch script:

[color=#000000]ffmpeg[/color] -i video.[color=#000000]MTS[/color] -vcodec copy -acodec copy video.MOV

Clipwrap to remux not transcode, if you're on a mac and don't like the CLI:

[url="http://www.divergentmedia.com/clipwrap"]http://www.divergentmedia.com/clipwrap[/url]

Here's another free one, that should just remux too based on the broadcast version of ffmpeg, ffmbc:

[url="http://www.magiclantern.fm/forum/index.php?topic=2732.0"]http://www.magiclant...hp?topic=2732.0[/url]

Or maybe remux to matroska with mkvmergeGUI, although don't know if that helps with CS6:

[url="http://www.bunkus.org/videotools/mkvtoolnix/macos/"]http://www.bunkus.org/videotools/mkvtoolnix/macos/[/url]

[url="http://www.bunkus.org/videotools/mkvtoolnix/downloads.html"]http://www.bunkus.org/videotools/mkvtoolnix/downloads.html[/url]

[Axel]

I never had problems with AVCHD in CS 5.5 on the Mac. I did load the CS6 test version, but it doesn't have the preset at all. Imho, when working with Premiere, ProRes will only help a lame processor, quality-wise there is no difference.

[Francisco Rios]

Yellow, thanks for the info. And what do you think about grading?
What will better to work on grading? prores or nativ avchd with your workflow? I though that the imac will handle better prores to work with grading, twixtor, etc.

Axel, As I said you need the paid version CS6 to get full preset included avchd.

Best regards.

[Axel]

[quote name='Francisco Ríos' timestamp='1353602925' post='22126']What will better to work on grading? prores or nativ avchd with your workflow? I though that the imac will handle better prores to work with grading, twixtor, etc.[/quote]

That's quite another cup of tea. Once you process your footage in a way that you change every pixel completely, it's hue, saturation, luma, it's position, you were crazy to render in any highly compressed codec (such as mpeg4, though you don't gain anything by transcoding [i]before[/i] the editing/grading). If you further change the timing, add multiple keyframes, animated masks, composite shots (all the heavy After Effects stuff), you were absolutely insane not to prepare the video for that by transcoding to an intraframe-codec in advance.

Can you tell the difference in quality then? This depends on your hardware. If your [i]preview[/i] (this is the wysiwyg-side of it) stays full quality then with AVCHD, maybe it will look the same (I'd like to see a machine capable of that). But even then, it makes no sense to wait a day and a half for the results (ProRes renders faster), only to have to throw away the whole if you detect some minor errors. A friend of mine, who builds really complex animations in AAE that take many hours and sometimes days, always renders as tiff sequences for this reason alone.

[see ya]

[quote name='Francisco Ríos' timestamp='1353602925' post='22126']
Yellow, thanks for the info. And what do you think about grading?
What will better to work on grading? prores or nativ avchd with your workflow?[/quote]

Grading in Premiere CS6 or AE, you're not working with native avchd or prores it's imaterial, the frame is decompressed into memory and converted to RGB for display including interpolating the sub sampled chroma in some way and with color processing / grading most of the tools work in RGB and if a choice done at 32bit precision preferably.

[quote]I though that the imac will handle better prores to work with grading, twixtor, etc.[/quote]

As we're all more than aware if our machine is not upto editing the source then there's two options. We buy a faster machine or transcode to something we can work with to get the job done. But that is to solve performance issues, there's no increase in 'quality' transcoding.