HMC150 Spanned clips direct to DVD, on Mac?

ullanta

ullanta

Veteran
Greetings! I'm wondering if anyone can report any success on a super-quick way to dump HMC150 footage to DVD, with spanned clips properly stitched together.

Can anyone confirm that Toast 11 will do this?

Will Premiere Pro CS5 do this, without too many steps (seems like you have to export to Encore, and I'm not 100% sure that CS5 will even stitch clips together properly).

Can anyone confirm if ClipWrap will handle this (argh! can't test with the 1-minute demo!)

Thanks,
Barry
 
Premiere Pro CS5 does stitch clips togehter perfectly as long as the original folder structure is intact. I do often shoot longer concerts, and have never had any issues with CS5 and stitched clips.

But yes, you are forced to render the footage prior to going to DVD in CS5.

/Roger
 
Regardless which NLE you use, the AVCHD video will of course have to be transcoded before it goes to DVD; whether it's by Encore, Premiere, AME, FCP, or whatever else you're using.

Regarding the stitched clips, if you import the media using the media browser (instead of just dragging the MTS files) and the original directory structure is in place, it will stitch clips perfectly 100% of the time.

This is outlined in Adobe's AVCHD workflow document on their site.
 
Phil1076 said:
Regardless which NLE you use, the AVCHD video will of course have to be transcoded before it goes to DVD
Click to expand...


Well, yes, but my issue is finding an approach with the least human involvement... FCP, for example, can burn a DVD from the timeline unattended, but needs to transcode AVCHD to get it into the timeline. I don't have Premiere, but was hoping that, since it should be near-instantaneous to get the AVCHD footage into the timeline, I could then just have it burn a DVD from the timeline like FCP... ideally, 2 or 3 minutes of my time and then the computer grinding away as long as necessary. Adobe's workflow talks about "sending" to encore, but I have no idea how time-consuming a process that is, or how fast one can set up a simple play-on-insert DVD in Encore... can anyone comment? Averdahl, I assume from what you say that the "send" process involves rendering?

I have Toast 9, which will do something like this, and it's what i use now for quick dumps to DVD, but it doesn't stitch clip segments together seamlessly. I'm hoping Toast 11 might...?

And, it seems, ClipWrap WON'T stitch AVCHD together (according to their website). Argh.

Dare i say it, how about on the PC side? Anyone know of something that will get me a DVD with just a minute or two of effort?
 
With FCP, you have to transcode to Prores, and then you can go to DVD, which requires another transcode to NTSC or PAL.

With Premiere, you can just import AVCHD natively and then render out to NTSC/PAL.

I'm not sure how FCP works....not sure how you can export to DVD directly from timeline. Wouldn't you need to setup a DVD menu first/set beginning and end actions etc etc?


With Premiere, you can send your project to encore directly. If you don't care about customizing the DVD menu, Encore has several pre-made menus (some generic, some themed) that you can use. It literally takes about 3 minutes to setup the DVD menu if you're just using a preset menu. You then build the project and Encore will do all the transcoding of AVCHD to NTSC as well as the DVD menu, and can either burn it directly to a disc or put it in an ISO for future burning. The process of finalizing the project takes only a few minutes if you're using one of the default menus, and the final rendering/transcoding then depends on your computer's speed.

PP has absolutely no problems with clip stitching. You can read about the AVCHD workflow in Adobe's site or google it.
 
Phil1076 said:
I'm not sure how FCP works....not sure how you can export to DVD directly from timeline. Wouldn't you need to setup a DVD menu first/set beginning and end actions etc etc?
Click to expand...
If you can stand one of a few standard templates, you can just do it all with one command from the timeline.


With Premiere, you can send your project to encore directly.
Click to expand...

This is what I'm curious about... how long does this take? How long would it reasonably take me to do all I have to do (after mounting an SDHC card) to set up a process that will let me pick up a finished DVD when I come back, say, the next day?
 
The question is how much control you want over the DVD in Encore. You can drop all your (native) footage on a Premiere Pro timeline and without any rendering send it to Encore (which auto creates a timeline for you and makes it the first play), and tell it to make a DVD. It really can be as simple as that. The only thing you would need to do (although even this is optional) is set the end of play action (i.e. tell it to loop or stop).

If you want fancy menus then clearly that takes a little more effort.

However, if all you are doing is dumping unedited footage from a camera to a DVD, I'm having trouble thinking what menus you could even want. Simple autoplay would probably do the job?

[Edit] So, I just tried this to make sure I wasn't misleading you. I created a new Premiere Project, imported an HMC card, created a sequence from all the footage and sent it to Encore. The only real delay (which was about 30 seconds) was while Premiere conformed the audio, but I was making a DVD in 8-10 mouse clicks (excluding folder navigation to find the files) and just over a minute of time for a full HMC card. Now, to be fair, the transcoding (from AVCHD to SD DVD) is going to take some time, but it's an automated process to transcode and write the disc from here. I could leave it running and come back to a completed disc.

You could do similar things in FCP7, but you have the problem of needing to re-wrap or transcode the footage first. For rush jobs like this, CS5 is currently the faster way. The new version of FCP (8) may change things.
 
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ullanta said:
Averdahl, I assume from what you say that the "send" process involves rendering?
Click to expand...
Yes, once you use Adobe Dynamic Link to send the Premiere Pro Timeline to Encore the footage must be transcoded to MPEG2-DVD in Encore before you burn the DVD, or in AME if one prefer that.

It takes a couple of seconds to send the Timeline to Encore.

/Roger
 
Averdahl said:
Yes, once you use Adobe Dynamic Link to send the Premiere Pro Timeline to Encore the footage must be transcoded to MPEG2-DVD in Encore before you burn the DVD, or in AME if one prefer that.

It takes a couple of seconds to send the Timeline to Encore.

/Roger
Click to expand...

Just to clarify, sending from Premiere to Encore via dynamic link does NOT require rendering as part of the 'send'. The rendering happens in Encore as it's creating the DVD, but this doesn't happen until after you click the 'Build' button.

So, for the avoidance of any doubt, there is no transcoding time and no rendering time for you to wait for before clicking on the final 'Build' button, and once you click the Build button you can walk away and come back later to pick up the DVD.
 
Great! Thank you all, that's what I wanted to hear! Unless anyone can say Toast 11 can have the same effect, looks like Premiere is the way to go!

(I just tried Toast 10 and it does NOT stitch clip segments together).
 
Phil1076 said:
With FCP, you have to transcode to Prores, and then you can go to DVD, which requires another transcode to NTSC or PAL.

With Premiere, you can just import AVCHD natively and then render out to NTSC/PAL.
Click to expand...

This is not entirely accurate

FCP requires a lossless transcode for editing purpose. However, the workflow from there to go to SD DVD is no different than any other editing system.

There is no transcode to NTSC or PAL. Instead, the pro res timeline is encode to mpeg2 compliant video streams and ac3 audio.

The resulting m2v video and ac3 audio files are used to author a SD DVD in the same manner as other editing systems

Transcoding to pro res, of course, provides 4:2:2 color space, which does aid for grading, FX and titling purposes, at least in mine and other's experience
 
David Saraceno said:
FCP requires a lossless transcode for editing purpose.
Click to expand...
Not lossless... just a transcode to one of FCPs native formats (AIC or ProRes for HD)

However, the workflow from there to go to SD DVD is no different than any other editing system.
Click to expand...
That's what I'm trying to find out, but it seems not to be the case... look here http://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/fcp_7_share_stone.html for details on how you can burn a quick DVD (or Blu-Ray) directly from the FCP timeline, with menus for timeline chapter markers, even. If Premiere Pro would do something like this, skipping the ProRes transcode, that would be my optimal workflow!
 
May be we are saying the same thing, but the transcode to pro res provides a better color space, and intra frame editing. It certainly isn't a generational loss at all.

And the transcode does improve grading, fx and titling in my experience.

I'm not a fan of native editing of computational intensive codecs except for p2 based mxf DVCProHD.

But others are, especially for fast turnarounds.

It depends on your workflow and preferences.
 
Well of course the whole purpose here is to AVOID spending any time so there'll be no editing, grading, effects… my only concern is getting raw longform footage onto a DVD with as little human effort as possible.
 
Here's what Premiere Pro CS5 offers:

1. Import the native clips.
2. In just a couple of clicks, add them all to a sequence.
3. Send that to Encore via Dynamic Link. Takes a minute or less.
4. Check your Encore settings for DVD creation.
5. Burn the disk. This part takes the most time, as the media must be converted from HD to SD for the DVD. But that applies to any and all software you use for the process. The high definition original must be converted to standard definition for DVD burning. Where PP saves you time is step 1. It takes the native clips.
 
Is there some editing involved in there as well? :)

And can you detail the minimum system requirements, including CPU and GPU, to attain that workflow.

My understanding is that native editing is directly related to CPU and GPU for Premiere.
 
David Saraceno said:
Is there some editing involved in there as well? :)

And can you detail the minimum system requirements, including CPU and GPU, to attain that workflow.

My understanding is that native editing is directly related to CPU and GPU for Premiere.
Click to expand...


If all you want to do is take an HMC card and dump it to DVD then no editing is involved. It's a simple workflow and any CPU can do it.

There is a bit of a myth that CS5 required certain GPU cards to be able to edit footage natively. This is not the case. What the GPU does is add real time effects for *some* of the effects (only those that are GPU supported), but this is not required for editing. In fact, none of my computers have the GPU accelerated hardware available and I still edit and color correct native footage.

Even my Core-2-Duo can edit native footage if you aren't trying to get complicated......!
 
Thanks Jim! Thanks to you and some earlier posters I'm convinced that PPCS5 will do what I want…. Now I just have to see if we can budget for it!
 
David Saraceno said:
To be fair, there are some system requirements even to edit natively:

http://www.adobe.com/products/premiere/systemreqs/
Click to expand...

There are some system requirements for supported GPU acceleration - yes - but GPU acceleration is NOT required for native editing, which is where the myths start coming in to play.

There are no low end Mac cards supported by Adobe for GPU acceleration and we're mostly a Mac house. I can't do anything to the MacBookPro or the iMacs to add acceleration even if I wanted to spend the money.

However, my MacBookPro and one of our iMacs are Core-2-Duo with only 2B of ram and no GPU acceleration. Both of these can play back native footage in adobe timelines. The only time they start to struggle is when adding transitions that need lots of CPU power. If you render the transition (and just the transition) they still play fine. We don't typically use these machines, but they 'can' do it in an emergency.

Would I want to edit a complete feature on them? Answer = No. For that I use MacPro 8 Core (again without GPU acceleration) or the iMac with i7 quad in it (again without GPU acceleration). And, just to be clear, we aren't talking just one video track here, I'm talking about 4 video tracks, each with their own native footage being played back simultaneously. I've done as many as 6 (that's typically the most cameras as we have running simultaneously) and it still worked without GPU acceleration.

To be fair, FCP can do the same thing, once you transcode everything to ProRes, but that would put me 12 hours behind and time is money.
 
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