Until Adobe does support AVCHD video, why not use the solutions that are available today?
There's tons of info on the *other* forum about it, but a quick recap:
Option 1:
- Copy mts files to wherever (via plugin or manually...)
- Use plugin to display / launch in Lightroom (AnyFile or JF's video plugin)
Option 2:
- Re-wrap mts files in a video container that *is* supported by Lightroom.
PS - I was going to add a plugin option to re-wrap mts files into a supported container file format and import automatically, but I never got enough info from AVCHD proponents.
PPS - Video support was no surprise to me ;-}
Reminder:
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It may be another year or more before Lr4 is out - do you really want to wait that long?
Summary:
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I'm *sure* (I dont know) Lr4 will support AVCHD, but until then...
I had posted this as a question rather than a FR because I was hoping to find out Adobe's thinking. It was changed to a FR, but I'm still hoping Adobe would weigh in. It is a critical issue for me.
(PS: I'm not sure that Option 1 works because of the way Premiere Pro--my editing app--handles metadata. The option I've adopted is to cut LR out of the loop. I just use other tools.)
PS - Adobe considered AVCHD (Adobe employees did chime in on the forum *after* Lr3 was released) but it didn't make the cut for Lr3. My guess: Lr4. But Adobe *never* reveals plans for future versions, so...
I looked into option 2 for a while. I understand some people use Mediacoder to change mts to mp4, but that leads to audio problems, which they then use Audacity to solve. I have no idea what Mediacoder is, and wouldn't want to do this unless there was an app that I fully trusted.
The main problem we ran into with AVCHD is that we're using native OS libraries (i.e. QuickTime) to create the thumbnails in grid and to play them. QuickTime doesn't support .MTS files, and coverage on various Windows versions was spotty. We definitely hear you on the feature request.
I'm sure if you do a little research you can find something that works. If you do (or anyone else does), then please let me know. If its easy enough to do it via a simple command line, then I'll automate it via plugin, as an option for the brave...
Any thoughts from Adobe on translating .MTS to .MP4 instead of trying to keep them in original containers? My (rather limited) experience indicates the folders & mts format is more nuisance than desirable for the users even if Lightroom could handle it without translation.
Photographe - Lee Jay had NO problems with audio. Why don't you give it a try? I mean, if it looks good, sounds good, loads into your editor, supports metadata, and plays in your player, then there's no problems. Sure - archive the original, why not? The mp4 vs. mts "envelope" is really just a way to house the video & audio streams, plus metadata. Nothing is being re-encoded... There's no real downside of giving it a shot, and you may have what you want, and be able to wait far more patiently & happily for official Adobe support.
A question for Julie and other experts: does Lightroom support the video from Nikon D7000, which is H.264 compression stored in .MOV file?
Rob: I googled Mediacoder. At least half a dozen different programs using that same name came up. One site triggered a security warning from my firm's server. I really don't want to play where is Waldo, and typically I do not install software I don't trust. In Adobe I trust.
The software is open-source, and you can download a binary from CNET - should be safe: http://download.cnet.com/MediaCoder/3... - this is for Windows (are you on Mac?)
Right now I'm considering a Nikon D7000, which wraps H.264 compressed video in .MOV file. Is that supported?
Did you try downloading mediacoder from that cnet page? It sends you here to the "publisher's pages": http://mediacoder-sourceforge.net/.
Anyhow, I really am not interested in hacking my way around. I am editing mts files just fine right now without LR in the workflow. Sure, video support happened to be one of the main factors that swayed me in favor of upgrading from LR 2--I would have been happy editing my photos in Photoshop/Bridge CS5 and only sending the output to LR 2 to organize--but Julie Kmoch explained pretty clearly that Adobe just didn't have time to support .mts files in LR3 because of OS issues. Oddly, Bridge CS5 displays thumbnails of mts files just fine on Windows 7.
The bar is higher for LR 4. For LR 4 to convince me, it has to do more than support mts--for which I have devised a workflow that doesn't include LR--it has to support all files that might be used in a video including audio. I have another feature request on that and we'll see what happens.
I get it. You'd *like* to have your AVCHD videos imported along with your photos in Lightroom. But the problem is manageable without re-wrapping or plugin automation in the interim. - One version at a time I guess...
Lightroom supports .mov file format and h.264 streams, so it probably supports D7000 video, but I don't know for sure. But good idea to find out for sure before buying one... I couldn't find it straight-away in the product info - I'd definitely start a different question thread if I were you...
I just tried a full-fledged digital asset management program called IDimager. It has full support for all video formats. When I pointed it to the main folder where my AVCHD folders reside, in no time at all it had gone through all subfolders, found the .mts files, created a thumbnail for each one and added them to the catalogue, sorted by date and ready for meta-coding. I can't tell you how satisfying that is. Next, I will test for inter-operability with Premiere Pro CS5, but just having all of the files in one space is a great boon to productivity. A 30-day trial is found at www.idimager.com, and I definitely won't commit until I've tested it thoroughly. Any indication from Adobe on future support for AVCHD and other media files would also be helpful.
OK, video isn’t really my main thing so this is by no means a deal breaker, but once you get used to having all of your camera output in one workspace inside of Lightroom, it becomes really difficult to go without! (Browse for files in an Explorer window? Oh no!)
Any and all feedback, comments, or possible workarounds would be greatly appreciated.
This thread already mostly covers the ideas I've had, namely:
- "re-envelope" mts files to supported format, or
- use John Ellis' AnyFile, or
- use Jeffrey Friedl's video plugin
Some people are using 'RC Importer' just to get the mts files from the card into Lightroom, in conjunction with the above, but you can also just drag-n-drop...
I tried Friedl's video plugin. It's a valiant effort at fixing this problem. What it does is create a jpg image from the video file and then adds that jpg to the catalogue. I never use it. Why, you might ask? This is neat trick, and kudos to Jeffrey for doing it, but it really is not a DAM solution....I can't add metadata to the video file, can't search for it by file type or metadata, can't move the file, and so on, because the video file itself is not in the catalogue.
Thanks for reporting back to us Photographe. But, can't you just do all those things to the jpg instead? And then when AVCHD video support is finally added, use JB's Syncomatic or something to transfer the metadata from jpg to the video.
Anyway, assuming that's no good, I guess to accomplish your goal you'd have to use the "re-envelope" solution, eh?
I toyed with plugin support to automate the re-envelop solution, but was never able to finish the job - still, a drag-n-drop batch file could do it, no?
Unfortunately the answer is probably "no" for a number of reasons (depending on what you're trying to accomplish).
First, other programs, such as Adobe Premiere Pro and Bridge, don't recognize the jpgs as proxies for video files. So if your goal is to catalogue video files NOW to help you edit them in Premiere, this is a nonstarter.
Second, this doesn't help you find video files since LR thinks they're JPGs. To search for them, you have to search for JPGs. If you can keep that straight day in and day out, ok.
Third, what about the folder structure? Unless you collapse that, the videos will still be separate from your photos, and will have a different naming convention (i.e. no naming convention).
Fourth, if you recall from previous discussions, one of the problems with at least some AVCHD implementations is that the camera does not produce unique file names. This does not help with that problem. Also, the identical file names could confuse Syncomatic (or at least require some thought to get around).
If your only goal is to be able to browse to the files in LR, yeah you can do that, and then you can play them by navigating to some menu item hidden in the plugin menu if I remember correctly. But Bridge can also do that probably more easily.
In short I really didn't find it helpful for me. For a while, I thought of moving over to IDimager, which is a very powerful DAM package. But in the end the solution I chose might surprise you. I got rid of the camera and got one that used a more user-friendly video format.
The re-envelope solution probably works to an extent. You still have the issue of collapsing the folder structure and renaming and copying to the right folder, and I have no idea whether Premiere Pro will like it or not (Premiere Pro will not add metadata if it thinks the file is messed up, even though it might play and edit it.)
Thanks Photographe - much clearer. I think if I had AVCHD, I'd import them along with my photos using 'RC Importer', which I use anyway. In that case, the folders would go bye-bye and they would receive the same filename treatment as my photos. Then re-envelope them for standard video handling in Lightroom. Although I think I like your solution better (get a new camera ;-}
From what I can tell, there is absolutely no reason not to extract the mts files from their folders. The folders seem to me like excess baggage tagging along because AVCHD is derived from BluRay. I could easily be wrong about this, but from what I know...
In which case, maybe that's what Adobe should do to support AVCHD - discard the folders and rename the files like photos, then re-envelope on-the-fly instead of copying. Any reason that wouldn't work? That would solve a lot of problems, for Adobe *and* their users, but would it create any?
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