Trimming AVCHD clips?

[Clay Hayes]

What's the best way to trim AVCHD clips? I shoot a lot of wildlife and end up with lots of long clips, like a minute or more, but may only need 10 seconds of it. Is there a quick way to run through a clip, set in and out points and keep just what you need? I'm editing in PP CS4 but my computor locks up when I run it without flipping to P2.

Thanks,

ch

[Cyphermx]

once you have all your footage imported into premiere (upper left panel), double click the first one, it opens in the source panel (to the right), there you can playback the video and set the in (i) out (o) points, when you're all set drag the video down to the timeline or press the comma key (,), that's pretty much the same thing everybody does..

the key is the source panel, explore all the buttons and their shortcuts to get a better idea of all the things you can do..

I don't know what OS you're using but on OS X you can set in/out points with Toast before transcoding, in fact I think the avccam viewer software can do that as well but I'm not sure..

[Kimchoc]

Pinnacle does the trimming quite a bit easier. With about 4-5 clicks I can export the file. You can probably find it for less than 50.00 if you look hard enough. For PC that is.
I can actually use it on my laptop as well. 4gb ram dual core. Nothing fancy. You can buy about 3 laptops for one Mac. Sorry.

The software that comes with the camera, I hear, does a nice job too.

[Clay Hayes]

Thanks guys, I downloaded AVCCAM Viewer for my PC (Vista) but, it's not able to find my files. I followed the instructions in creating and selicting the AVCCAMVIEWER folder as the storage site, but still not working.

Can anyone point me in the right direction? BTW, the PASS sight realy sucks!

ch

[sebaz]

The software that comes with the camera, I hear, does a nice job too.

If you're talking about AVCCAM Viewer, it doesn't cut clips. You might be thinking about the consumer version called HD Writer, which allows for that, albeit in a very rudimentary way.

To answer the OP's question, it's hard to find a program that will cut in the way you want, I've tried for years unsuccessfully. Other than the HMC40, I have a Canon HF100 which came with a consumer editing software called Pixela Imagemixer that is a torture to use, but it does a great job at smart rendering the footage so it only recompresses a few frames around cuts. Cyberlink Powerdirector also does that with consumer grade AVCHD, the type that has a bitrate around 16 Mbps, but both of these don't smart render files from the HMC40.

Also, don't get sucked into Vegas Pro 9 by people that say it does AVCHD smart render, because it doesn't. It works only half the time and also for consumer grade AVCHD, not for higher PRO bitrates.

So to better answer your question, the best you can do is buy a lot of Verbatim DVD-Rs to backup your files and have them available to copy back to the hard drive when you're ready to edit them in your NLE.

[Kimchoc]

No, Edios or something like that is the program that comes with the camera.
I dont know why everyone is having so much trouble with AVCHD. Maybe I'm not understanding.
I just drop the .mts file in Pinnacle and split away. Add a basic title, a few fades. Isnt that about what the OP wants? Just to cut 10secs out of his video? I can do that standing on my head with Pinnacle.

[Clay Hayes]

If you're talking about AVCCAM Viewer, it doesn't cut clips.


I figgured that out after I downloaded it. I did find a program that does what I'm looking for though. It's called SmartCutter. It's kind of a pain but it works.

Is anyone familiar with this program?

ch

[sebaz]

I figgured that out after I downloaded it. I did find a program that does what I'm looking for though. It's called SmartCutter. It's kind of a pain but it works.

Is anyone familiar with this program?

ch

I tried SmartCutter but it doesn't work well. On the frames that it recompresses, it doesn't do it in a legal way. I don't know the deep technical part of it, but when I play the resulting file in any player, it goes berserk on the frames that it recompressed.