Not sure what you mean by "You must either provide these two apps the original AVCHD directory structure or, if your screen recorder doesn't create one, create it by hand"?
Here's my full tutorial on the subject of AVCHD import discussing all aspects of it (including an answer to your question), including creating a standard AVCHD directory structure. Note that the writeup discusses the previous, 10.0.5 version of FCPX; the recently-released 10.0.6 streamlined AVCHD import but I think it still requires the entire directory structure so my tutorial is still applicable. Sorry for pasting it here in its entirety; an external link to the original article would be self-promoting:
TUTORIAL: this is how you can manually create and import your FCPX / iMovie / Aperture-compliant AVCHD camera archives
You may already have run into the problem of having to import AVCHD videos into
Final Cut Pro X (FCPX),
iMovie or
Aperture on your Mac. You may know that if you have the original(!) archive the way your camera has saved it into its memory card, you can easily do this. However, should you want to manually create a file archive you want to import to these apps (or add videos to existing archives), you'll soon realize there aren't tutorials explaining this at all. Sure, you can always remux MTS files to MOVs (all these apps directly read MOV files – you can even drag them into the apps!) with a decent MTS -> MOV remuxer like
iVI but it's a time-consuming project, particularly if you have several of files to convert around - it's always better to import the original, non-remuxed AVCHD files now that all these apps support them.
As this problem is very-very-very common and, in user forums, generally no true solution is suggested (see for example
THIS thread), I've decided to investigate the problem myself and come up with a decent solution. I've decided to do so because not only manual file addition isn't explained, but also even plain AVCHD import has been made unnecessarily complicated in several posts. For example, many people suggest you must create a virtual disk in
Disk Tool, copy the AVCHD directory structure there, mount the disk so that you can import AVCHD videos to FCPX / iMovie etc. It's
absolutely unnecessary.
Note that this isn't an iOS, but a Mac (and, AVCHD archive management/addition-wise, even Windows-)specific article. Nevertheless, I'm a video pro and have been publishing iOS video articles here – so, let me publish a non-iOS-specific one in this series, particularly because it also adds information to older iOS articles like yesterday's Part I of my Interlacing bible series.
First, let's start with the basics: importing AVCHD videos into FCPX / iMovie / Aperture on your Mac, plain and simple, without unnecessary steps like the above-mentioned disk image creation.
1. Import AVCHD videos into FCPX / iMovie / Aperture
If you don't want to manually add vides to the camera archives and only want to know how your AVCHD videos should be imported to these three apps, this section is for you. Let's start with FCPX.
1.1 Import into FCPX
1, click the “
Import from Camera” icon in the Clip pane, annotated below with a red rectangle:
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or select
File > Import from Camera. You'll be shown this; click “
Open Archive” at the bottom:
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2, Now, navigate to the directory containing the
PRIVATE or
AVCHD directory (the latter is inside
PRIVATE in several (but not all – see the
multiAVCHD tutorial below!) cases). The following screenshot shows navigating to a directory named “
tobackup” , which, in addition to two other directories, has an AVCHD-compliant
PRIVATE directory in it:
(You can quickly see it's AVCHD-compliant by it not being rendered as a folder. Should you, say, remove the file
PRIVATE/AVCHD/BDMV/index.bdm (the main Blu-ray desrcriptor) from it, it would become un-importable and the whole “
PRIVATE” would become rendered as a casual directory.)
3, Here, in this directory, without selecting anything, just click “
Open”. The clips will be listed and you can select what you need:
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The clips will immediately be imported and you can start working.
Side note: Incidentally, I could check out the individual (top) fields of the 1080i60 Sony RX100 video I've imported this way and didn't need to put it into a project (as opposed to the videos I've imported yesterday – see my Interlacing bible Part I), also setting its parameters. A screenshot showing this is
HERE and
HERE for the one- and two-field-case, respectively.)
1.2 Import into iMovie
Select
File > Import > Camera Archive. You're presented this:
Select full-quality import (the bottom), unless you really don't want the best possible quality.
Now, navigate to the directory with the root of your AVCHD directory. iMovie will even tell you it recognizes a camera archive in there (see the annotation below):
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Import all clips (or, if you switch the switch in the lower left corner, select the ones you need manually; this case is shown in the following shot):
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After this, you only need to supply where, which event to import the clip(s) to.
1.3 Import into Aperture
Click the “
Import” icon (second on the top left; see annotation below), navigate to the directory containing the root of your AVCHD archive (bottom center, also annotated), select the clips you want to import and click
“Import Checked” (bottom right, also annotated):
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Now, to the question of manually adding files to AVCHD archives.
2. Manually creating / adding files to AVCHD (camera) archives
Above, I've already mentioned
[PRIVATE/]AVCHD/BDMV/index.bdm is the main AVCHD / Blu-ray descriptor, which, among other things, tells the AVCHD-capable apps what clips there are in the archive. This is why, for example, you can't just copy additional M(2)TS files to
[PRIVATE/]AVCHD/BDMV/STREAM, not even if you name them properly (for example, if the last original file in the
STREAM directory was "
00007.MTS", you name your copied file "
00008.MTS" and so on) – they simply won't be shown when trying to import the camera archive.
A quick glance into
index.bdm reveals it's a binary file and, therefore, can't be edited manually – only via third-party apps. Of them, there are two very famous ones:
bdedit and
multiAVCHD. We'll need the latter (the former isn't able to add new files, albeit knows a lot of niceties like MTS demuxing.) Download and install it. Note that it'll work under
CrossOver on the Mac just fine; I've made my screenshots below in this mode. (Note that, by default, the output files will be stored under
~/Library/Application Support/CrossOver/Bottles/multiAVCHD_4.1.exe/drive_c/multiAVCHD with CrossOver.)
First, click
“Add video files” in the top left corner (annotated below). Add any number of files. In this example, I only add MTS ones; however, you could add even AVI's, MOV's etc. An example of adding several camera videos I've collected for my forthcoming
Camera Connection Kit and iOS Compatibility bible (see their name in the “
Compilation” group, after returning from “
Add video files”):
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Click “
Start” in the bottom right (also annotated above). In the next dialog, select the (default) PS3 one (top left, annotated):
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The AVCHD archive creation starts. When it ends, you'll be notified in the status row:
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Note that multiAVCHD doesn't create a topmost "
PRIVATE" directory. The three apps will import the files it creates nonetheless - you won't need to create the directory either.
Side note: THIS DBM editor has nothing to do with our
index.bdm file – it's a database editor.
