New to Mac questions (new 13 MBP)

[robd54]

This forum has been great and helped make my decision to buy the new 13" base MBP. So far I absolutely love it and get very frustrated at work now trying to do multi-finger swipes on my POS HP laptop....
Anyway, last night I started trying to play with iMove and some of my HD videos taken from my Canon HF11. I was suprised and disappointed that OS X doesn't natively support AVCHD (.mts) yet, but quickly found a player on the app store that worked. However, when playing them back there is a noticeable jitter/stutter in the picture especially when panning. I tried a full HD video taken from my 7D (.mov) and that played fine w/out any of that. So my question is, what's the deal? I have to check to see what the frame rate of those videos are, but they all play fine on my deskop and other laptop (both PCs). I bought this primarily to have a single place to do all my photo/video editing and this may be a problem. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

 

[Hellhammer]

AFAIK AVCHD is format meant for filming. It is not meant to be edited or played, so when you are editing it, it will be encoded into another format and when you finish editing, it will be exported into a third format that is meant for playing (e.g. .mp4).

 

[Petronas]

AFAIK AVCHD is format meant for filming. It is not meant to be edited or played, so when you are editing it, it will be encoded into another format and when you finish editing, it will be exported into a third format that is meant for playing (e.g. .mp4).

I am having the same issue as well.

So when you edit AVCHD what is the procedure? Just drop the raw AVCHD files into iMovie and edit away - Then export to a proper viewing format?

(What format is recommended for best quality and uploading to Youtube (Or do those two things don't go together)?

 

[Hellhammer]

I am having the same issue as well.

So when you edit AVCHD what is the procedure? Just drop the raw AVCHD files into iMovie and edit away - Then export to a proper viewing format?

(What format is recommended for best quality and uploading to Youtube (Or do those two things don't go together)?

I believe iMovie supports AVCHD but when you are importing content in AVCHD format, it will be encoded into a different format that is more efficient for editing. I think Adobe Premiere supports native AVCHD editing but like I said, that format is not designed and is thus inefficient for editing (uses a lot resources, may be buggy etc). I don't know what format iMovie will encode it into but that shouldn't be important.

I don't remember what export formats iMovie supports but H.264 (.mp4 or .mkv) should be the best in terms of quality and file size.

I'm not really an expert when it comes to video editing and different formats though. I'm just repeating what I have heard from other in here

 

[robd54]

These answers make sense from an editing perspective; the way iMovie imports kind of stinks cause it needs the whole file structure as opposed to some windows NLE (non-linear editors) just suck in the .mts directly. The playback is what concerns me though; if the mbp doesn't support some frame rates. I can play the AVCHD's directly on my PC, PS3, etc. so the format itself is meant to be played directly on some devices.

 

[Hellhammer]

What player did you try? You could try e.g. VLC, MPlayer and Movist.

 

[robd54]

I tried mplayer; i could try a few others tonight to see if it was just the player or truly an issue. I'll report back with findings and the details on the video.