Panasonic TZ-10 and MTS files.

[hochl]

Dear all,

Someone suggested that I should post to this forum for this problem. I hope this topic hasn't been covered before.

The Problem: Videos shot by a Panasonic TZ10 compact camera.

I have searched intensely with Google, but the only thing that turns up is a commercial product that converts those videos for the iPad. I've attempted numerous invocations of ffmepg and mencoder, but no result would work, mainly because the audio lags way behind the picture. Additionally, picture quality is often not good.

Is there a way to convert those videos to some different format, like DivX or H.264? I'm kind of desperate, those MTS files start clogging up my precious HD space because they're so damn huge! :-/

Cheers,
H.

[Ghitulescu]

It was

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=154791&highlight=TZ10

[hochl]

Ok, this all reads rather confusing, I must add that I don't have Windows and thus, no knowledge of all these tools. Is there an mencoder/ffmpeg/linux way to achieve these conversions?

[poisondeathray]

no

ffmpeg/mencoder get messed up results with the frame repeat flag , so your duration will be off and/or you'll get frame doubling

you might be able to run avisynth through wine

[hochl]

Hmmmm, that's bad. Are there plans to improve this situation in the near future? If not I'll have to use wine and check, good idea btw.

[Ghitulescu]

The situation will improve in the future.
http://shedworx.com/avchd-lite-50p
Meanwhile, one better uses a camcorder to shoot videos, and a photocamera to shoot photos.

[hochl]

Hi again. I just want to ask if any open source tool/method to convert those Lumix videos has become available since my last post. I tried again, but I still cannot convert my videos that take up precious harddisk space.

[Emulgator]

BTW, the .mts files from Panasonic Lumix cameras do already contain H.264 video streams
(in my case from a FT-2: 1280x720x25p framedoubled on 50p, from a GH-2:1920x1080x25i or 24p)
and this is already a good compromise between storage space and quality at the moment.
And harddiscs are quite affordable these days.
I would not reencode, (one loses quality by compressing further), rather remux to AVCHD discs.
On Windows multiAVCHD comes into mind. (On a different OS you may have to use a virtualisation engine)
These discs are playable on most Panasonic Blu-ray players (and other brands too, of course)

NLEs: some can handle decoding of AVCHD, some choke and some can not handle.
Decoding is always necessary, so why not take the decoding load off the NLE.

If one has got to edit AVCHD, then my suggestion for a workflow is ( and I use the same):
Index with DGAVCIndexDI (9,99$ + 15$), decode with DiAVC (9,99$ are already included in payment for DGAVCIndexDI)
to uncompressed, (now any NLE will gladly edit this), then reencode to final format.
All these suggestions need to be run on a WinXP at least, so virtualisation engines for other OSes are a must.

[Ghitulescu]

...videos shot by a Panasonic TZ10 compact camera.
.......
converts those videos for the iPad.
....I'm kind of desperate, those MTS files start clogging up my precious HD space because they're so damn huge!

1. can the iPad display regular .M2TS files (like those from a BD or SAT)? I'm asking because I don't own and probably never will own Apple products.

2. Almost all cameras shot HD movies either in .MP4 or .M2TS containers (they might be differently named, like .MOD or .MTS and so on). Some, few, also use .MOV.

3. I simply don't understand why people willingly chose HD then complain about sizes (even stranger, they downconvert the videos to something like 640x432, which is even less than NTSC/PAL)?! It's like buying a Hummer then complaining about MPG too low :p :)

Follow the advice already given: use multiAVCHD and author AVCHD (or BD) videos. No quality loss.

[hochl]

Well, a 20 second video clip has a size of approx. 18 MiB. For a short video clip, you maybe want to keep it, but quality is not THAT important. Many small clips of 20 or 30 seconds easily eat up disk space, in my case around 20 GiB. That is too much for my taste, for short clips a quality of 640x480 would be totally ok. So conversion IS necessary, I don't see a camera option to reduce videos to an acceptable size, and since I already have 20 GiB that would be too late anyway. Thus, I need to somehow reduce the size of my video clip collection ;-) Of course, an OSS solution, for example with mencoder, would be my prefered choice, since I have Linux installed.

[Emulgator]

You can have 640x480, but in most of cases Panasonic cameras will deliver
lower resolutions like VGA compressed as MJPEG.

You want to transcode anyway, so x264 will gladly help you on further saving bits and squeeze these files as small as possible.

The few Panasonics I have had in my hands allow to be set for something like 640x480 if that is the goal.

FT-2: Recording Mode: Motion JPEG (VGA Resolution is not available in AVCHD mode) -> Rec.Quality : VGA
This delivers 640x480x<systemframerate>

GH-2: Recording Mode: Motion JPEG (VGA Resolution is not available in AVCHD mode) -> Rec.Quality : VGA
This delivers 640x480x<systemframerate>

And for the files already shot in higher resolutions you will want to crop/pad and resize to 640x480 before encoding.
Avisynth is your friend.

[hochl]

Playing back my latest holiday videos I realized that VLCC now seems to be able to play the videos with correct audio/video, though, mplayer still plays the video 2x faster, so the audio lags behind. AFAIK, VLC uses mplayer as a backend, is that correct? If yes, what are the options to playback the AVCHD videos with correct video/audioo synchronisation?