The Panasonic HDC-SD1 is a very nice little video camera that records High Definition video. We bought it for our trip to Alaska earlier this year, but did not really use it very much. But a couple of days ago Holly used it in videoing the birth of a new cousin, and this gave us 55 minutes of high definition video to do something with.
The SD1 records on SD-HC (Secure Digital - High Capacity) cards. We were using a 4-gig card (that’s what the camera comes with), and the 55 minutes resulted in 3.38GB of files. Most of these are the actual video and audio that is stored in .M2TS files - this is part of a kind of super mpeg format used in BluRay DVDs called AVCHD. The .M2TS files are really all you need, but they are surrounded by a directory structure which starts with the AVCHDL folder, and the M2TS files are hidden away in the AVCHDL\BDMV\STREAM (or more precisely in HDWRITER\071109_1\PRIVATE\AVCHDL\BDMV\STREAM).
This is all starting to sound rather complicated. The problem here is that AVCHD is still a fairly new format, and the programs for dealing with it are not particulalry user friendly. A case in point is the software that comes with the SD1, called “HDWriter”, which is of limited functionality, and rather confusing to use. However, it does let you burn regular DVDs of various clips, with some simple editing. And given what I was trying to do, I think I should have just used that for my initial DVD burning.
But no, I decided I needed some proper video editing software, so after a little bit of research I downloaded the trial version of Ulead Video Studio Plus, and started to use that.
The first problem you encounter was how to get the video into Ulead. I tried dragging the M2TS files in, but no dice. I then tried connecting the camera, and importing from the camera, but still no luck. A bit more googling led me to the correct solution, which was to click on “Capture from Disk”, and treat the camera as a removable hard drive, navigating down until you find the AVCHD, at which point you can import everything. That was a rather tedious process, as you have to select each clip individually, and selecting a clip takes a few seconds. Bu eventually all was selected, and I started to import.
Things seemed to be going well, and I burnt a DVD fairly easily using the first clip (about 45 seconds) and it did not seem to take particularly long. So I though I’d make a DVD with all the clips. That’s 55 minutes in total. So I plonk them all on the timeline, chose one of the cheesy DVD menu templates, and start burning.
20 hours later, out pops a non-working disc.
Yup, 20 hours. It actually took 20 hours to make a DVD. I was expecting maybe 2-3 hours, given that it had nearly an hour of high definition video to decode and recode, but 20 hours? I guess I was just being overly optimistic. I was doing the encoding a 1.66Ghz Centrino duo laptop with 1GB of RAM. Not the meatiest beast in the world. It probably would have been 3 times as fast if I’d used my Desktop machine. At least with the laptop we could just set it going, and leave it going, all day, all night, and a bit of the next day.
Then it did not work. It turns out though that this was just a bad disk. Luckily I’d told it to save an image of the disk, and I was able to simply burn a copy of that and it all worked.
What does this fun tell me? High definition video editing is not quite ready for prime time. I seems like everyone just wants to share their video over the internet anyway, and HD support is being left for people with a bit of time on their hands. Simply recording a one hour DVD from HD source took 20 hours. A faster machine would cut that down to 6-7 hours, but still.
Right now I’m recoding everything as 720×480 DVD format mpegs, seeing as that’s my target format anyway, hopefully it will be a bit easier to work with. It’s nearly finished converting now, been going about six hours. This is just using the batch convert in ULead VideoStudio, there’s probably some much faster method. I’ll have a look into it.
[UPDATE] We ended up using Adobe Premier Elements 4.0 with the converted mpegs to put together the DVD. It turned out though that the MPEGs were not really that much smaller than the m2ts on the disk. Of course they are easier to work with as they use less processor power. The mastering time for a ten minute DVD was practically real time, like 10-15 minutes, which I was very happy with. I’ve no idea how it would be with m2ts files. It did crash a few times, but just about bearable.