Welcome back to MacBreak Studio, I'm Mark, I'm with Steve we're here in the
studio in beautiful
Prescott Arizona. Not Prescott, Prescott. I'm getting better at that, been out here a few times
we shoot in a couple different locations but anyway this is pretty cool that we're talking
about somebody's been out there for a while that is definitely worth addressing
Steve has got some great things to say about AVCHD and Final Cut Pro. Right, now
Sony and Panasonic got together and they decided we want our own format so they came
up with AVCHD which is the Advanced Video Codec and
you'll find it in a lot of their cameras, like these little Sony Handycams a Panasonic Handy
Cams. Your professional cameras actually record your GH4
I shoot AVCHD on that C100, Canon. So this format is used a lot, a lot
of people are wondering how does Final Cut Pro deal with it and that's the
subject of this particular episode. So let's let's take a look alright. So I'm in
Final Cut Pro right now. I already have a library called Disneyland, because I already have some
footage from an AVCHD camera, I'm going to select the event, hit Command-I bring up the Import
dialog and select the camera. That's my camera card right there. So you took the
camera card out of the camera, and you stuck it in the SD slot in your MacBook Pro? Ok.
And what you're seeing here all the individual AVCHD clips available. Just like it
would be with any camera. Now the thing about dealing with
this footage, like any footage, you have two choices. You can bring in an
individual clip by selecting, it or multiple clips, or you can make
selections on your clips. Or, and this is what we've always talked about, you can make a camera archive.
Which is select the entire camera and then click Create Camera Archive.
And what that will do is essentially make a bit for bit clone of your camera's
original card. So it will be a perfect backup for your card. Right and will preserve all the metadata.
Which is really really important. That's one way to deal with AVCHD
just make camera archive, or just import the clip you want. Or the portion of the clip.
So if I go ahead and select this clip, and I click Import. By the way, notice its
going to copy it to library. Right, of course, you can't leave in
place when you're on the camera card,
it would never let you do that. So I'll go ahead and click import selected,
and immediately the clip comes in. The thing that you need understand about this is
Final Cut Pro did nothing to the original media, it just took the content that was
really h264 encapsulated in this AVCHD container, and wrapped it in a
QuickTime movie container. So that's a new thing, when Final Cut Pro is copying the
media over, its actually re-wrapping it from this AVCHD container to a .MOV container.
That's right.
It's re-wrapping it. And even though, just so for some people, the media's available
for editing the copying might still be going on in the background because
I've seen several people mention, they put their stuff in the start editing, they
pulled their card out, and can't understand why their stuff went offline.
Because Final Cut Pro its so fast it's actually still copying, you can edit
while the media still be being copied. Absolutely. So you need to make sure it's finished before you pull the card.
The thing is, Final Cut Pro will allow you to bring the stuff in re-wrap it and you
don't have to transcode. Yeah, there's no transcoding going on. There's another way
to deal with AVCHD media. I'm gonna jump out to the Finder for a moment so you can
see this. So here is the card and here's the AVCHD files. If I drill down into it.
I'm gonna show package contents, then there's this BDMV file. Go show package
contents again, you'll notice that there were all the individual like transport
streams these are all the video clips and of course they mean nothing to the
OS. It doesn't know what they are, it can't play them. Exactly, the point is all the metadata,
everything about the clip is stored within these these containers. Ok, so that
means and I don't recommend this normally. That means you can take this
AVCHD file and drag it to a driver, drag it to your desktop. You could in fact that's what
I did here. I created a folder called Sony Handycam, and I drug that very file
into separate folder. And you also dragged the DCIM folder because any stills would
show up in there. Exactly. While I don't recommend copying the contents of your
media to your hard drive some people do. A lot of people do, rather than
creating camera archive they just drag the cont ents over. So let's look at how Final Cut deals with that.
Let's go back in to Final Cut Pro Command-I. And I'm
going to navigate to the desk up, excuse me, the desktop is that's where the folder is.
There's that folder Sony Handycam and those are all, Final Cut Pro sees it.
It sees it directly. You can't see in the Finder. But that's the beauty of it, Final Cut can see all
that metadata inside that enclosed AVCHD folder. And so I can skim whatever.
The reason that Final Cut is able to see these clips is because they're embedded
in that folder with all that metadata that's, why you can see it. If you think about it that
AVCHD file is kind of like a Camera Archive. It really is, it really i.s
Yeah. So the thing is, is that you can make multiple selections, like I'm doing here,
just like, you know, actually like part of a clip. Here I've got three selections and
notice, copy to library. Here's the thing to point out. This makes sense I can't leave them
in place even though I copied it to the hard drive. Normally, once your media's on a hard drive
you can leave it there and point to it, but not- Not in this case with
AVCHD Final Cut, even though you moved your hard drive, Final Cut still treats it as
if it was a camera original media card. Like a Camera Archive. Again so you gonna have to copy
the media somewhere. You're gonna have to do that. So in this case I just say you know,
copy to library, import selected, and it's going to re-wrap those files and bring them in
and just to clarify re-wrapping is not transcoding it's not affecting the
media whatsoever just the container. That's right, now there's one more option I want
to show you that's very popular with a lot of people. Jump out to the desktop
and go to this software called ClipWrap by Divergent Media. You can get it on their website
If I even have their website up. There it is, ClipWrap, it's $50 it's really great because you just
drop your AVCHD files on there and it just recognizes the codec, the format, and the
frame rate, everything and it will wrap it for you really fast. You called it
something? I called it. I did. I referred to it as a batch re-wrapper transcoder.
For AVCHD. Okay so, it's kind of ridiculous so what I'm gonna
do is when they go to ClipWrap, what I wanna do is open up that folder that had the AVCHD
file in it, and I'm gonna drag it right into the ClipWrap folder. So you don't need to
right click and choose open batch contents or any of that stuff, you know,
that nonsense, that sort of dangerous stuff that- There it is it's waiting for a,
just waiting to re-wrap. It sees all the clips immediately, and check it out. You can choose a destination here, a
different one, it puts it in your movies folder by default, but then look
format, it rewraps, so it'll just take that original container, it does what Final Cut does except
it does it on a batch scale. But you can also transcode it. So, if you have a machine that's
a slower that has trouble with AVCHD media, cuz it's fairly processor
intensive. It is. To manipulate AVCHD media you could choose to transcode it
or if you're going to be doing a lot of color correction manipulation you might want
to transcode and you can do it right here rather than doing in Final Cut. If
you wanted to especially if somebody just gave you the .MTS files. That's right,
that happens a lot; here's an MTS or a BDMV file or AVCHD file, and I don't know what to do with it.
In that case Final Cut won't be able to read those because it doesn't have the
metadata, so you need something like ClipWrap. And then there's one last thing is that you can
optimize it for different NLE's, Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere, I think it is a metadata
optimization thing I'm not sure exactly what it does but if you go into Final
Cut, you might as well check Final Cut. Okay so last thing is, convert. Wow that was fast. Well let me this is a trial
version, so it's only converting the first minute. So that why it's really fast. Ah, yeah
you know, these very short clips. But the bottom line is it's going through here
well the re-wrapping should be very fast, it's just the copying might take a little while because
it's also copying the media to the location you've designated. You see it's
demo limit to 1 minute, but you know what it's just you know pay fifty bucks and you
got this great little app. So I'm gonna jump back to Final Cut. Ding.
Done. Go back to Final Cut, go back to the import window, and I'm going to
navigate to the movies folder. Inside there ClipWrap creates a folder
called ClipWrap, and notice if I select these, there's my clips from
AVCHD re-wrapped footage. Now, one of theadvantages doing this, this way with ClipWrap
is that now you have the option to leave files in place. Now you can leave them
wherever they are without say the whole process of copying them somewhere
again. But there is a downside to this method too. The downside is, I cannot make
individual selections. I see, I can see right now there's a band, yellow band around the
whole clip. You have to bring in the entire clip. You can't bring in part of the clip, the only
downside, but really this whole process of ClipWrap is kind of like a failsafe
if things weren't done right properly, if you didn't create a camera
archive, or import directly off the card. If you didn't use a AVCHD folder, if you didn't copy
the whole thing, then this saves your butt, it really says your butt
and deals with those individual MTS files. That is really cool, great.
Steve, great set of tips, very helpful AVCHD is kind of confusing,
complicated but Final Cut Pro deals with it natively, and hopefully that made
sense to you guys, and helps you understand why you can't always leave in place when
you want to leave in place. So, awesome. Thank you.
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