What's wrong with his MACintosh

commanderspike

commanderspike

Carbonite Member
Arggh. This is driving me crazy. Snow Leopard Macbook Pro, can't play AVCHD (.MTS) raw footage from my GH1.

VLC Player: fails immediately, with grey corruption, eventually crashes
Toast Video Player 3.0: works well for 3 or 4 seconds, then begins to stall. Very unstable.
iMovie: works fine but not much good as a quickie media player + needs to transcode
Premiere CS4: plays without transcoding, off the bat... but with major corruption issues
Quicktime X: no support

I think by now I've tried every single solution in the box. The Toast one is especially frustrating... so close, yet so far... I find it strange that the products that say they support AVCHD like Premiere CS4 and Toast, and VLC for that matter, STILL have problems - is it a configuration / OS problem??

Any suggestions guys? Just want to double-click and play. It would be really useful.

Toast, for the first 3 seconds by the way makes the footage look GREAT.
 
For Premiere Pro CS4, make sure you're not viewing in "Draft" mode, from the panel flyout menu. I was seeing a ton of artifacts until I changed it to "Best" when reviewing some AVCHD.
 
Toast and VLC support AVCHD playback.

So why don't they work properly? Any ideas?

Does anyone have a Mac that plays back GH1 MTS files direct from a hard disk in VLC Player or Toast?
 
MacPro 3GHz quad:

VLC = FHD-forget it-will play but unwatchable, 720p smooth frame rate with only occasional artifacting, but who needs that?

Premiere 4.1 = 720p is perfect when set as Hank suggested.
 
Core Duo (first gen) 2.16ghz Macbook Pro = same result in VLC. So it's not a processing power issue. The software is basically broken?
 
Yes

EDIT: I half expect Martti will show up to once again tell us about Toast, but he's probably getting a little tired of that by now. :) Seriously, I would try Toast, but it seems a shame to buy it simply to get a good AVCHD player as I doubt I'd use it much for anything else.
 
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I have tried Toast. It's better than VLC player.

It plays for 3 seconds before stopping, instead of 1.

One time it even made it to 5 seconds.
 
You can do what I do to view the files quickly. Up the PRIVATE folder to the desktop then open up FCP. Go to Log and Transfer and select that folder. You can view the files in the preview window now before having to log and transfer. I have a new macbook pro and am looking for a better alternative as well. For now this is working for me though just to see what file I actually want to convert.
VLC is a no go for FHD and SHD's quality is useless to me. I will do some research into this and see if I can find something out.
 
I've discovered another option today, which kind of works so far. I'm demoing Lightroom2 as Silky Pix combined with the lack of RW2 support in OSX is getting a bit tedious. Anyway, after googling I found this video plug in for LR2 http://regex.info/blog/lightroom-goodies/video-assets

I've only briefly tested this on my MBP 1st gen, but I'm getting solid playback of FHD files, but with the problem that the poster frames are all messed up. I need to try it a little more, but if this could be made to work well then it would be a great option for cataloguing before conversion.
 
I found the Adobe Camera Raw 5.5 update fixes the RW2 issue for Photoshop on the Mac, if that is any help.

I don't understand Apple's resistance to supporting AVCHD in Quicktime X and RW2 in Preview. You'd have thought with Apple's penetration into the creative market, and it's emphasis placed on photo & video editing, they would jump at the opportunity to support formats like these. Am I missing something or is there anything fishy going on?
 
AdrianF said:
I've discovered another option today, which kind of works so far. I'm demoing Lightroom2 as Silky Pix combined with the lack of RW2 support in OSX is getting a bit tedious. Anyway, after googling I found this video plug in for LR2 http://regex.info/blog/lightroom-goodies/video-assets

I've only briefly tested this on my MBP 1st gen, but I'm getting solid playback of FHD files, but with the problem that the poster frames are all messed up. I need to try it a little more, but if this could be made to work well then it would be a great option for cataloguing before conversion.
Click to expand...

Thanks for letting us all know about that one. I'll give it a go. It's not quite a double-click full screen playback quickie option, but it's better than viewing a poor quality postage stamp size window in Final Cut Pro's Log & Transfer.
 
I don't understand Apple's resistance to supporting AVCHD in Quicktime X and RW2 in Preview
Click to expand...
Me neither,
The LR plug in is a bit hit and miss with the .MTS files, but it does sort of do the trick. The other option as Nitsuj said, use Log and Transfer for note taking before import, but that doesn't really help with one click viewing.
 
A solution may now be at hand:

http://shedworx.com/no-avchd-in-snow-leopard

The makers of Voltaic caught onto the fact that even in the latest Apple OS, there was a lack of AVCHD support in Quicktime X.

Knowing that any potential software would not suddenly become obsolete due to Apple building it into Quicktime X, they decided to push on with several new products, including...

HD Quicklook for Finder MTS file thumbnails (http://shedworx.com/hdquicklook)

Ta da!
At least that solves one small problem, even if it doesn't actually playback the files.
 
Been reading a lot about the internet of Clipwrap 2.0

This apparently will allow us to drop raw AVCHD footage into Final Cut Pro and Quicktime X, etc. without transcoding at all.

It does seem to me very wasteful, to turn what is essentially H.264 footage into H.264 Quicktime footage, taking lots of time and degrading the image quality in the process.
 
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