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Question

MTS files (AVCHD) in After Effects - supported?

Forum|Forum|16 years ago
September 29, 2009
3 replies
43047 views

I have a Panasonic HMC 151 camera, clips saved as MTS.

I can add them to an After Effects comp, and I can see the individual frames, so far so good. When playing back however, the movie hops back and forth and the motion and progress is funny.

So - what is this?

ingvarai

This topic has been closed for replies.

K

kate5958

Participant

I am very impressed with Pavtube MTS Converter. I've had good results converting the .mts files to .mov, with the settings h.264, 1200, 1280*720, 25fps, aac. The files look good on my Mac running Adobe Premiere, edit easily, and convert well to DVD format. Pavtube will also turn out super 'lossless raw video' files, but these are so huge my mac can't cope.

http://www.pavtube.com/guide/compress-mts-for-adobe-after-effects.html

ingvaraiAuthor

Known Participant

FWIW, I have upgraded After Effects to CS 5, and CS 5 has no problem with my Panasonic MTS (AVCHD) files. This is a big leap forward, although it wold have been good if Adobe supplied updates for CS4 fixing this. Anyhow, the new rotobrush justifies the upgrade, so all in all I recommend AE CS5.

Ingvar

Mylenium

Legend

MTS files (AVCHD) in After Effects - supported?

Generally yes, but obviously not all of its flavors. Some cameras do not flag their streams correctly or add additional, non-standardized data that confuses AE. For those formats unfortunately only converting them before bringing into AE guarantees correct results. If you can provide a short clip (~30 MB, 5-10 secs.) we can investigate in the hopes that at latest for CS5 those formats are supported correctly.

Mylenium

ingvaraiAuthor

Known Participant

I have a 30 seconds long clip. I make a new comp in AE and add this clip to the timeline.

I set a working area of about 8 seconds. The first 5 seconds playback is perfect, then it starts to hop back and forth. When sliding the work area on the timeline, I observe the same phenomenon. First 5 seconds fine, the rest just a mess.

This is a real real disappointment. AVCHD is here to stay. In Sony Vegas, my favorite NLE, I edit AVCHD right off the camera. In Cs4 Production Premium, which costs 7 times more, I cannot edit AVCHD. I really do not want to wait for CS 5 to be able to use MTS files directly. I hope Adobe will issue an update to fix this. Or at least come up with some sort of a workaround or utility that will fix the problem.

The images look just great as they are. Fix this issue please, I do not want to transcode and introduce more artifacts than I already have in the compressed AVCHD files, I want to use my MTS files as is. In case you wish, I can supply a file. How do I do this?

Anyhows - I had thought Adobe already have access to such files, this camera is all over now, very popular.

http://www.panasonic-broadcast.com/en/products/high-definition/avccam/AG-HMC151E-Video.php

ingvarai

ingvaraiAuthor

Known Participant

Adolfo and Mylenium have this issue covered, but here's my confirmation of what they're saying:

There are a lot of variations in how camera companies et cetera encode to various formats, and then providers of decoders (such as the folks that Adobe license their codecs from) have to keep up with these variations. It's an unfortunate reality that the folks doing the importing of various formats are always running behind, catching up to all of the manifestations of all of the new formats---some proprietary, some odd variants, some just plain broken. That's one reason why we do dot releaseses (updates) to add or fix various formats. We know that there are some hiccups with some variations of AVCHD, and we're working on them. If your camera puts out files that are subject to these hiccups, then transcoding before bringing the files into After Effects is a good idea.

I stand corrected, it is not atriviality, thanks for the info and your time on this issue.

If your camera puts out files that are subject to these hiccups, then transcoding before bringing the files into After Effects is a good idea.

If you visit the Sony Vegas forums you will se people nag Sony about minor issues regarding AVCHD (slow start, jerky playback, slow rendering), still Vegas (on my PC) runs my Panasonic MTS files just fine. I do indeed use image sequences, and I do it more and more, so my initial complaining about this subject was perhaps a bit unfair to Adobe. But.. what if I did not have Sony Creative's Vegas to do this transcoding? Well - I happen to have. It is just my general discomfort about sooo many transcodings and formats etc. in my workflow that resulted in this post.

My MTS files look just GREAT in After Effects - and they run fluent in realtime the first 5 seconds, if they only would keep on running like that..

A

Anonymous

Yes, AVCHD is supported natively in AE CS 4.

However, as you noted, there are some decoding issues with footage from certain, newer models. The specific camera you mention keeps being mentioned all the time. Bummer, I know.

The workaround for now is converting the footage to another format. If you google for "AVCHD converter", you'll find a ton of applications that do just that.

Many users will tell you that converting temporally compressed footage (AVCHD, HDV, etc) to a spatially compressed format (or uncompressed, if possible) is always recommended for performance reasons. Agreed, but at the same time, a supported format is a supported format. Unfortunately, file-based formats are a bit of a moving target, as they are more likely to bend the specs as new models are released. Adobe is working with all parts involved. I can't mention a time frame, though.

T

Tamás22354154cwlb

Participant

2021, and still the same problem...

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