The .MTS "importer" for Quicktime

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Barry_Green

Moderator
Panasonic's announced that they're going to make a quicktime plug-in component for Macs, which they're calling the "MTS Importer". I've seen a demo of it. I don't know what I'm "allowed" to say or not, but let me just say this -- from what I saw, it does exactly what it needs to, in exactly the right way. It makes AVCCAM or NXCAM or AVCHD shooting completely native to FCP -- and not just FCP, but every video app on the Mac. Imagine shooting 12 hours of footage on an SDHC card, and importing it all into FCP in about two seconds -- all of it instantly available. It's the way tapeless was meant to be done, and I was quite impressed. This is the way EDIUS does it with P2, and why I was such a big fan of that workflow -- now FCP will be able to do it with AVCHD (from a GH2 or GH1 or consumer camera) or AVCCAM (from a Panasonic pro cam) or NXCAM (from the Sony pro lineup).

Performance is of course up to your Mac's hardware; I don't even know if Macs are offering graphics card acceleration of h.264 decoding or not, but however fast your Mac is with h.264, that's how fast the performance will be.

I also don't know if the new FCPX would duplicate this functionality; if it turns out that FCPX allows true native editing (i.e., no conversion to Quicktime) then you may not need this plug-in component for FCPX. But the plug-in will work on any version of FCP that runs on Intel processors, so all those folks with earlier versions will be able to benefit from this new functionality. And if FCPX does require a conversion to Quicktime, you can avoid that entirely by using the plug-in on your Leopard or Snow Leopard system. And I believe it will work with any video app that uses Quicktime, so -- After Effects, or Color, or Motion, or Avid, or versions of Premiere prior to 5.0, or the Quicktime Player (you can now use Quicktime Player to view all the footage on a card instantly)... anything.

And it's free. Hard to argue with that! :thumbsup:

Coming out "in summer."
 
tumbleweed said:
how about for P2 footage shot on the 170? Any shortcut/plug in coming out to speed up that import/transfer?
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There are several of those on the market and have been for years. MXF4Mac, Raylight, and Calibrated's MXF importer have been available for a long time. They all do the job the same way.

Panasonic initially tried to make one for FCP, it's included free when you install P2CMS. However, right about when they released it there was a major revision to FCP, which didn't work the same way with the importer somehow, so ... well, bottom line is it doesn't quite work exactly like it should -- it doesn't bring in the audio simultaneously with the video, you have to import audio separately. But if you have FCP now, and you've installed P2CMS, you already have a free plug-in installed that will let you drag MXF files right to the timeline. It just doesn't automatically bring in the audio too. From what I understand, Raylight and Calibrated's MXF Importer definitely do, and I'm pretty sure MXF4Mac does it the right way too.
 
I have considered Raylight but decided not to spend money on it for now. I haven't "needed" it yet. But it would be nice to have something FREE that does it properly. Thanks for the info.
 
Ohh! can't wait to get that.. I am going crazy trying to deal with .MTS files out of my GH13 on a mac .. I am trying to find a drag and drop way to convert my .mts to various formats without having to go through final cut's capture stuff, but can't find any programs.. Volatic doesnt work for me for some reason and neither did the trial for neoscene.. and elgato's turbo h.264 doesn't convert to proress. what is the easiest workflow for you barry? thanks
 
I don't use the Mac, so I don't have those issues -- I just drag and drop into Premiere CS5.

But for Mac users, until the plugin comes, maybe you'd be happy using ClipWrap 2.0? Or hopefully our Mac users will chime in with better suggestions?
 
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