Video editing; AVCHD and Premiere
 

Never done video editing before.

Got an AVCHD camcorder and Premiere Elements 4 on 30-day trial. A week into the trial and we're flummoxed at the start :( I've chosen Premiere as it gets many good write-ups and apparently v4 now writes HD discs (assuming my PC has the capacity).

We recorded a number of video clips, put them on the PC, used Sony Picture Motion Browser to top and tail them. Now have Premiere and want to put them together. Start new project, Get Media. We can see it all but it only seems to load/show as an audio file (blue square with speaker icon) - click it, all we can hear is the soundtrack, can't see any image.

Yet I notice that in the small drop-down menu "view media type", it does indeed come under the video settings - doesn't show as audio. (When I view "By detail" I think the files show as MPEG-2 transport stream, or something like that.) I heard there was something odd about AVCHD files being part sound, part video, but it's all a bit much for my brain...

Surely we should be able to see the thumbnail pics to see which clip is which? Is there something fundamentally wrong, or do I need to change a simple setting somewhere and all will become clear? I think then we just drag them to the timeline and edit as normal?

Sorry for dumb questions :( (there could be a lot more in the next 3 weeks).

Brendan

Last time i used Premiere I just imported direct into premiere from the camera and edited away from there...? Maybe try a straight import?

Same here. Priemere never use to be able to edit mpeg files directly. Don't know if it's changed with the latest version...

Richard - we can do that, but we already have these clips that are off the camera and onto the PC. (I wonder if we could put them back on the camera then import straight from there... hmm, possible...)

Iain, you'll have to explain that to me! It's supposed to be one of the best s/w packages for film editing and I thought mpeg was a common film format, I don't understand how it wouldn't edit them! (The one thing I fear is that editing them with the Sony s/w has changed them somehow, the way one edits a jpeg with photoshop and it saves as a ps file which no-one else can open...) Or maybe your key word is "directly"?

I've been busy at home for a deadline this weekend, will have more time to dedicate to this from Sunday on. All (polite) suggestions welcome! :)

Brendan

That's because mpeg is the final result, and can be pretty highly compressed, (i.e. 2 hours of uncompressed footage can easily be 30-40gb, whereas the mpoeg will be under 4gb to fit on a dvd).

Premiere etc work with uncompressed footage (i.e. captured directly from the camera etc), and then compress to mpeg once all the editing is done. This is because 1) the end quality will be much higher, and 2) the editing is much quicker as it doesn;t have to constantly encode / decode stuff.


More likely that Premiere doesn;t support editing of mpeg files. It's a pretty non-standard thing to do (for the reasons given above).

Thanks:) I think I'm getting there but I can tell this is going to be a long and painful journey...

But compressed / uncompressed - does the AVCHD thing make a difference? Remember this is not MiniDV, it's footage directly recorded onto a memory stick. I think it only takes two hours of footage for a 4GB card. Suggests there's some compression involved already?

Rats. I specifically chose this camera as it was supposed to be a joy for fools to use. Looks like the joy (and the fool) stops at the editing point. I hate needing a degree in audio-visual software to stick three clips together and put them on a CD :(

The latest versions of Premiere are supposed to handle high definition stuff, so it should work with AVCHD by now (although don't quote me on it). I've not got a HD camcorder otherwise I'd give it a go for you :)

Here's a link for getting it working with Premiere Pro 2...

Editing AVCHD in Premiere without intermediate codec. - VideoHelp.com

Note that the 30gb figure I quoted was for SD, so if you are getting 2 hours of HD footage onto a 4gb card there's some pretty serious compression going on there.

Right, last night I tried shooting three clips in SD and loading them straight from the camera into Premiere. Worked perfectly.

Shot three more in HD and tried loading them - not a sausage. So there's some problem between SD and HD.

I'll see if I can work with the patch suggested in your link. Hope it works with Premiere 4!