How to catalogue and organise your AVCHD footage....

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daihard

Well-known member
Hi all!
Well, to start off. My wife and I do wedding photography and videography. We used to use mostly Canon (video side), but since we left to start our own BIZ, I went for a more tunned "video" DSLR. The Panasonic GH2.
Im also a mac user with most of my editing done through Final Cut and some AE.

Im having a hell of a time organizing all my AVCHD footage, its not natively supported without conversion. But who wants to uncompress AVCHD and store that? (My previous work place had 4 Drobo Pros...FULL!)
I've looked into various programs, but nothing can compare to what we have for photo organizing.
I'm "trying" to use iDive and VideoPier HD to import... But its hard to move/delete/send to external editors (ie: FCP & Premiere)
I'd love for something similar to Lightroom, iPhoto, or even better Bridge (.mts support).

Any Suggestions, how to optimize this aspect of workflow??

DaiLon
www.realmotion.info

iMac i7
Panasonic GH2
Nikon D700
Lumix LX5
 
**An update, on this "quest" for the best organiser.
I found FlamingoHD, seems to organise things relatively well.

However the program just takes a snapshot of the clip, so you cant play AVCHD within the app.
But it does allow for you to organise and sort all your clips with relative ease.
You can right click and send the clip to various programs to view and/or edit.
Its basically laid out like iPhoto, it gives you general information like clip length, date/time, FPS, Resolution, size, and even keywords.
 
I don't see anyone jumping into answer this, so I'll take a shot, though I am not a "hollywood professional" but simply a very serious amateur making money on video, in a small corner of the world. I have been using the HMC 150 using AVCHD for over a year, doing serious amounts of shooting with it, and yes, the media management element you describe I have yet to find a workable answer for. There doesn't seem to be an analogy to Lightroom, and the Panasonic clip management tools are horrible, especially for Apple (I use both Apple/FCP and Windows7/Vegas Pro 10.c). I have found that first and foremost, delete last clip is a great way to work (not sure it can be done on the HDSLR), and then when I get the PRIVATE folder to my hard drive, I put it inside the client name for the shoot ie. FOOBAR WEDDING\CAMERA 1\PRIVATE etc. Then I view it with the preview views of my editor (usually Vegas Pro these days). Final Cut, which I also use, is even worse, as I HAVE to transcode in there, and it really is very slow. I use the Log and Transfer to do the transcoding if I need to tag the footage with metadata, dumping it into unique bins or sometimes I just dump it into compressor, which gets it transcoded but doesn't carry key info along. It's really a mess, and should be much easier on the pre-L&T point. But that seems to be the story.

Anyone out there got a better way?

So that's the downside. The good side is that the footage is great looking,
 
Yeah, I use bridge. In regards to organizing, one thing I was taught that I liked was using numbers before the folder name to keep the folders in the order of your workflow:
01_original media
-01_Audio
-02_Video
02_Encoded footage
03_project files
04_exported files
05_documents
etc...
 
Bridge not a solution for AVCHD cataloguing.

Bridge not a solution for AVCHD cataloguing.

It apparently doesn't work with AVCHD.
http://forums.adobe.com/message/3426133
 
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