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Question

MTS files (AVCHD) in After Effects - supported?

Forum|Forum|16 years ago
September 29, 2009
3 replies
43052 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

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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

Mmh, I'm not sure if AVCHD, even its "Pro" flavor, is really the format of the future. I think that because of growing availability of almost infinite amounts of storage at low prices, even for hobbyists and semi-pros at some point RAW recording becomes a viable option, or at least only relying on binary compression, not destructive reduction of the actual image content. Beyond that I'd be careful with predictions. Formats these days come and go quicker than you can make up your mind about them. And of course for compositing in the strictest sense one could still argue that support for such formats is non-essential as comparing compositing tools to mere editing programs is not exaxctly fair. If AE wasn't so integrated with Premiere, would you even care for trying this? Other competing programs certainly don't - combustion*, Fusion, Nuke and even Motion do not accept anything other than image sequences or Quicktime files instead of offering native support. If you get my meaning - as much as AE is ahead in this game, it ultimately also turns into a disadvantage. the constant hunt for supporting the latest video formats IMO costs a lot of resources and effort that potentially could be spent otherwise...

Mylenium

I buy your opinion, I mostly agree. I dislike destructive compression as much as anyone else does, and hopefully we can film in RAW. Soon..

If AE wasn't so integrated with Premiere, would you even care for trying this?

Hm? I haven't tried Premiere, yet, it is After Effects that I am interested in. And Mocha, which I have upgraded to version 2 on my own. When it comes to MTS from Panasonic (AVCHD), I suspect there is a triviality that makes it not work. I any case, this is not the biggest issue in the world.

ingvarai

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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