Importing AVCHD file. Import will begin and almost finish then freezes.  Is there a 2 GB size limit on file size to import?  If so, is there a work around this?

Hi,

pdt2:

Is there a 2 GB size limit on file size to import?

No, there's not.  However, if your AVCHD clips are spanned across multiple files they will not import because Media Composer doesn't support spanned clips.  If you search the forum from the last 30 days for "AVCHD" you'll find a lot of posts about how to import AVCHD clips.

ciao,
Carl 

Do the following:

1. Get this softare and put it in the directory with your MTS files: FFMBC-0.6-RC3 binary here.

2. Create a .bat file, put the line below in the file, and put it in the same directory as (1):

for %%a in ("*.mts") do ffmbc -threads 8 -i "%%a" -vcodec dnxhd -acodec pcm_s16le -flags +ildct -b 120M "%%~na.mov"

3. Open a CMD window, navigate to the directory in (1) and run the batch file. This will pick-up all your MTS files and convert them to DNxHD120 8-bit with PCM audio, 48KHz, Stereo, 1536kb/s.

In my case, the MTS files were 1920x1080/50i. The "-b 120M" is the bit rate. The "+ildct" is the interlace flag. Eeach 2GB file (I think it was around 17Mbps), which is around 15m30s, took about 30 minutes to convert to MOV files. FFMBC was processing at around 11-13fps. It's a case of just leaving it running overnight if you have many files. It doesn't take much CPU power to do this.

With a 2GB MTS file (assuming 1920x1080/50i), the resulting MOV file is around 14GB. On my set-up, it would take about 30 to 50 minutes to import each file into MC5. It would first convert the audio and then a box would appear saying it was doing a fast import.

I hope that helps.

Mohammed

Hi

On a "old" Intel Core2Quad (Q6700) CPU and Win7/64, I noticed that FFMBC conversion with the above command line is not using all the CPU cores at max. (see the text in the CMD console when FFMBC is launched "Cannot parallelize deblocking type 1, decoding such frames in sequential order"); typically, I get about 11~12 fps conversion rate and 30 % CPU usage in this scenario.

So I tried to run two CMD processes in parallel, each one running a separate FFMBC conversion (with "-threads 2"). When outputting the encoded result (mov files) to a decently fast disk, I nearly double the total conversion framerate (each conversion process gets about 10 fps, so nearly 20 fps total, and 60% CPU utilization  ).

So, to significantly increase your AVCHD conversion rate using FFMBC, don't hesitate to run several instances in parallel (use Windows Task manager and/or Resource Monitor to find what works best for your system) !

This FFMBC conversion seems pretty tricky and I am not much of a computer whiz. Is there a simpler alternative? I do like the idea of converting to the Avid codec and time is not a big issue. Thanks in advance for your help.

mtahir:

1. Get this softare and put it in the directory with your MTS files: FFMBC-0.6-RC3 binary here.

I haven't been able to find the Windows binaries for FFMBC 0.6 or 0.6.1 (http://code.google.com/p/ffmbc/).

Have you ?

(I'm still using 0.5, but some fixes in 0.6 seem interesting)

Hi BenoitM

Try this zip file (0.6 version).  I've uploaded it into my Avid user area. Let me know if you can't access the file.

I primarily used this for spanned mts files. Depending on what camera I'm using, I tend to have smaller mts files which I import directly. I did find recently that using FFMBC (not spanned files) produced some files that wouldn't import into MC5 and I would get an error. I'm not sure what that error was now but direct import into MC5 seemed to work fine. The files that wouldn't import into MC5.0.4 all worked fine in various players.

Regards

Mohammed

PS. I updated the broken link in my original post to point to the file in my Avid user area.

bushfilm:

This FFMBC conversion seems pretty tricky and I am not much of a computer whiz. Is there a simpler alternative? I do like the idea of converting to the Avid codec and time is not a big issue. Thanks in advance for your help.

It's not that tricky... just download the zip file, unzip it into an empty directory, put yout mts files in there too, open a Windows command box (click on Windows Start menu, type cmd in the box), navigate to the directory, and type in the name of the .bat file. This will give you DNxHD120 8-Bit files with PCM audio, 48KHz, Stereo, 1536kb/s. If you run into any issues, you can try posting in the developers forum here. They're very good in responding. We'll try to help as best we can. I don't use it much but it was a bit of a 'get out of jail' card when I needed it. :)

Regards

Mohammed

 

mtahir:

Try this zip file (0.6 version).

Is is a 0.6 Beta or RC or a full release ?

Did you compile it yourself ?

It's 0.6-rc3 from what I can tell when I call up the exe. I didn't compile it.