Testing some sample footage from the new Canon HF20, I trimed the front and back off several clips and placed them in the timeline. I also included one full clip exactly as it came from the camera. When I rendered this, the trimmed clips came out all grey, but the full clip showed fine. Audio worked on all clips.

Is this to be expected with the current level of avchd support in 0.73?

--

Chris

Can you publish some footage here: http://www.kdenlive.org/video-editor ? It can help hackers improve H264 support in FFmpeg and MLT.

http://www.kdenlive.org/video-editor/canon-hf20

done. hope it helps.

To answer your question, this is not unexpected from AVCHD right now. Right now, the recommendation is to transcode the AVCHD to something editable and better performing. In the forums, there are recent suggestions about how to convert to DNxHD or high quality MPEG-4 I-frame only. A future version of kdenlive will make file transcoding more convenient. For now, you have to put the untrimmed clip on a timeline and Render it.

Dan, could you please provide links to these AVCHD transcoding instructions, preferably also with ffmpeg and/or mencoder/mplayer one liners for converting a number of clips overnight?

I managed to miss these and use some bad instructions which resulted in 60000 fps settings instead of 60000/1001, and I only saw the effect after days of editing in the rendered output...

Thanks.

Hi,

I use the following script:

------------------------------------------------------------------------
until [ -z "$1" ]
do
ffmpeg -y -threads 2 -i $1 -acodec libfaac -ab 256k \
-vcodec mpeg4 -vb 36M -s 1920x1080 -intra -flags +ildct+ilme $1.mov
shift
done
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Save it as /usr/local/bin/ffmpeg-1080i. Use it as: ffmpeg-1080i *.MTS. It will convert all MTS files in the current directory. It can be used to convert overnight.

It will keep the video interlaced, which is good for output to DVD or BD.

If you want to output progressive, replace the "-flags +ildct+ilme" with "-deinterlace". However your frame rate will become 30fps.

You can also change the resolution if you want.

I didn't use any parameters to force frame rate. Hopefully, I guess, ffmpeg keeps the source frame rate. I haven't had problems so far, but you may want to check if your clips are coming out as 60000/1000 or 60000/1001 after conversion.

If anyone has more suggestions for command line options to generate intermediate files, please throw them in!