GH2 My footage is glitchy. How can I fix this?

MrHeavySilence

Active member
Here is a photo album of what my problem is. I have no idea how to fix this. When I scan back to those locations with the playhead, they consistently give me the glitch. I'm thinking the video footage is corrupt but I don't know why the GH2 is doing this or how I can fix this. Hopefully somebody can let me know what I can do:
http://imgur.com/Umd6b&WCOX5&sYKpW&Tot72l
 
What I assume you're saying is that when you play the .mts files straight from the camera it plays fine with no glitch, but whenever you change the playhead in VLCPlayer the glitch appears and then disappears after playing the video again for a few seconds.

This is completely normal. The GH2 records in a compressed format, which essentially means that it throws out information in each frame and uses the other video frames to calculate what the image looks like. VLC Player isn't smart enough to figure out what the frame should look like when you move the playhead around like that. But if those parts of the video can play without you changing anything, then all of your footage should be fine.

When editing you will want to transcode your footage to an intermediate codec like ProRes.
 
And now I see that the video was a .mov :embarasse

It could still be a problem with VLC Player. Does the same glitch appear in quicktime? It also could have been an error when transcoding the footage.
 
Now that I pay attention, I see the same glitches when I edit in CS5 Premiere. ****. How can I make the footage run in CS5 without glitching?
 
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Are you using the .MTS files straight from the camera or are you transcoding them? If so what compression codec are you using? If you don't know what I am talking about how are you importing the footage in Premiere?

Regardless I would recommend transcoding your .MTS files using 5DtoRGB which is a free program.
 
When you are loading files into premier, depending on the format, there may be a small progress bar at the bottom right hand side of the screen that says "transcoding".
You must wait until the file finishes transcoding before doing anything or you will have glitches in the file.

That's not a very good place for them to put a progress bar, especially after another progress bar (loading the clip into premiere) has just finished in the popup in the middle of the screen.
 
Are you using the .MTS files straight from the camera or are you transcoding them? If so what compression codec are you using? If you don't know what I am talking about how are you importing the footage in Premiere?

Regardless I would recommend transcoding your .MTS files using 5DtoRGB which is a free program.

I'm using the MTS files straight out of the camera. Should I not be doing that? The compression codec for AVCHD out the GH2 is h264 I believe.

Thanks for the recommendation on the program; I will do some research on it
 
Yes it is H264 but used with the AVCHD settings which makes it impossible to scroll through.
Also you may want to try Movist player to view your footage out of the camera. http://goo.gl/fXGjw (it will not fix the glitch but it is faster than vlc)
If you work in an editing program you absolutely don't want to be using the MTS file. Do a transcode to prores with something like aunsoft.
 
I use Splash Player for my Canon and Gh2 video files. It plays them seamlessly without any glitches.

Give that a try, its free!
 
Yes it is H264 but used with the AVCHD settings which makes it impossible to scroll through.
Also you may want to try Movist player to view your footage out of the camera. http://goo.gl/fXGjw (it will not fix the glitch but it is faster than vlc)
If you work in an editing program you absolutely don't want to be using the MTS file. Do a transcode to prores with something like aunsoft.

Victor, can you please explain why we shouldn't edit an MTS file directly? I use Premiere Pro CS5, and I've not run into any issues with editing the native MTS file. What are the advantages of transcoding to Prores before editing? Will that not add a lengthy step in my workflow? Thanks!
 
Adobe premere cs 5 and 5.5 handles the mts file fine. You can edit those directly, then transcode after all edits for release.
Vegas 10 will too.

Aside from that, if the playback is stuttering it could well be a computer slowness issue. You need a fast cpu and hdd.
If that's the case, than transcoding before editing will help.
 
The purpose of transcoding footage to an intermediate codec like ProRes or Avid's dnxhd (not sure what Premiere uses) is to make editing easier and possibly increase the quality of your footage.

Editing compressed media is very processor intensive since the editing has to constantly decode the video as you edit. This can make editing a lot slower, and in some cases (as seen here) cause glitches. Intermediate codecs are less compressed (ProRes and dnxhd are technically "visually lossless") meaning the file sizes are much larger, but also require less processing power to play back and edit.

Intermediate codecs can also hold more information than compressed codecs like avchd. When you record onto a lossy format like avchd it throws out a lot of information to fit everything on an SD card. So when you transcode it to a format like prores it isn't actually going to add any information. However some transcoding programs interpret compressed media a lot better than others (in my experience transcoding to prores using 5DtoRGB retains a lot more detail thank Final Cut's transcoder), so taking the time to transcode your footage might be beneficial if you're doing work where every last detail is critical.

However, if you can edit with .mts file with no trouble, glitches or lag, and minuscule details aren't important then I wouldn't worry about it.
 
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