Organizing AVCHD footage

Allen Ellis

Allen Ellis

Well-known member
Hi all,

What are your reccomended ways to organize footage from the HMC-150? I know that when I'm editing I like to organize clips. For instance, I do shoots of a kid's day camp and I'd like to note which clips are preschool, middle school, etc. Even better would be to tag shots like 'action', 'cute', etc.

I'm feeling frustrated trying to do this. Ideally I'd like to tag the .mts files so that when I archive I can wipe out my DVCProHD footage and easily re-create it + meta data later.

But so far I'm at a complete loss. Bridge CS4 doesn't recognize .mts files, Panasonic's AVCCAM Viewer is useless (you need to set meta data before shooting which seems completely backward to me), so I'm feeling I need to transcode everything and rely on Premiere's folder structure to group clips together.

And that is how I've always done it with tape, but I was hoping with the file-based workflow I'd be able to take advantage of the features that are everywhere in photo album software, which lets you apply tags/keywords and do searches based on that.

Any other ideas? Am I alone in this quest... because unfortunately every tutorial simply talks about importing and editing, and it's near impossible to hear people talking about realistic data tagging and organization.


I'm thinking of keeping an Excel spreadsheet with my card-dump "ID"s and clip names.
 
I'm used to work with DV avi files created by Scenalyser where that program gives date/time stamp as a file name. That date and time were important to me and still are. Now I can see: 0000, 0001, 0002, etc. - dry numbers tell me not much :( I always have footage from 3 or 4 16GB cards so there are 3 times 0000, 3 x 0001, 3 x 0002, etc. With dv avi files titled by Scenalyser I click only once and I have all files in chronological order.
I have to dig in AVCCAM VIEWER to find out at what time particular footage had been shoot which is time consuming.
Vegas Pro 8c doesn't show in date/time stamp column anything. Maybe in next version it will.
Just my 2cents.
 
if only shooting on 1 card, i copy the raw .mts files to a hdd.
then i convert to my edit format into another folder.
then i view each file to identify it and move into sub-folders.

if a shoot fills up multiple cards, i copy the raw files over into separate folders on the hdd, 1 for each card (the filenames are identical)
then i use a free file renaming app (pc) to add a suffix to all the files in each folder so that if any file is every moved from its folder, there will never be any confusion with duplicate names.
then i proceed with converting to edit format.
and then organize into sub-folders useful for editing.

this keeps the original filename of the raw .mts and allows me to drop entire folders into my NLE, creating bins of clips.
 
I have to give this a bump because is driving me insane, I'm starting to get frustrated trying to find out the right files..... :(
 
Wow, I didn't think I'd see this thread again :)

What NLE do you use? I'm making progress using Premiere CS4.1 (playing with workflow in the cracks of work). I'll keep you posted on my findings.
 
TigerFX said:
Wow, I didn't think I'd see this thread again :)
Click to expand...

Came back from the dead...... :Drogar-BigGrin(DBG)

I am using FCP and I could have 20-30 clips coming out the card, doing 5-6 of these a week just imagine. So far I move the entire folder from the card into my hard drive with a card reader. Then, I log and transfer from the hard drive, I guess I am just lazy because I could name all the files but......... yeah, I guess I am lazy
 
Vegas is good at this. They have the media bend that works great. I just watched a tutiorial on how to keep things organized..pretty kewl stuff.
 
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