Hello, I am wondering what profile settings I should use to properly import 1080p 60fps video from a Panasonic HDC-TM700? The video is MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 in .MTS format. The actual frame rate is, I believe, 59.97 fps, so I'm not sure of exactly what profile settings I should be using.

Thanks for any help you can provide!

I have the same camera. I have been simply copying the *.mts files off of the camera over usb onto the hard disk.

For some reason, I am using the 1080p 30fps profile.

Typically it is a football game. I shoot about 150 clips of 10 - 15 seconds each.

I import the media, drag it onto the timeline, put a title clip in front of it and render it.

I render it to 1920 1080 and reduce the bit rate if necessary to get 40 minutes of video to fit on a DVD-DL disc. Then it plays on the PS3, some computers and some Blu-Ray players.

Then you can copy the DVD. The players and parents love it.

I'm new to all this, so I hope what I have said helps and does not mislead.

Kdenlive (in my experience on Ubuntu) seems to have difficulty with single clips that are huge being added to the time and can run really slow and/or crash. I would recommend breaking that high quality footage into smaller pieces and saving frequently while you're working on the footage in the timeline.
Also your youtube channel is great.

There is a profile "HD 720p 59.94 fps". Maybe create a custom profile based on this one.

Performance on a 60p AVCHD directly is going to be terrible! Please consider using the Transcode feature to convert them to DNxHD. Then, ask yourself if you really need the 60 fps, or if 30 is sufficient. For sports, it may make sense due to high motion.

Thank you everyone for your suggestions (and compliments)!

I have found that yes, trying to work with the video is just too stuttered for me to be able to produce video content.

I tried transcoding to DNxHD, but I am unsure of what settings to use. I do not want to lose quality by transcoding - do you have any suggestions?

Thanks!

1920x1080 30p 220 Mb/s. It is considered "near lossless," and its what AVID systems tend to use if that gives you some comfort.

Hi,
DNxHD is an intermediate codec used by professional editors too (although Avid released it as open source).
Please correct me if I'm wrong but this codec was born with the aim to be able to work with HD material without the need of a supercomputer and a raid system. I think you are supposed to start with uncompressed raw footage (something like 4:4:4 I guess...) and then compress to 220 Mb/s (for you in NTSC land) with an acceptable loss of quality.
When you transcode to DNxHD starting from HDV (25Mb/s) or AVCHD (24 Mb/s) or Panasonic XX700 60p (28 Mb/s?) you aren't compressing anything, you're actually "upsampling" (again, correct me if I'm wrong) so you should not lose any quality.
And if something is lost, I really can't see it.
I suggest you to take a look at this:
http://www.avid.com/static/resources/es/documents/dnxhd.pdf
Ignazio
P.S.: I'm sorry for my English, I'm Italian...

Thank you everyone for your help!

I am having some difficulty with the audio when transcoding to DNxHD. I am experiencing "popping" noises.

Is it possible for me to transcode my files to something easy to work with, and then de-reference the files/re-reference the old files, after I am done editing on the timeline?

That is, edit with the transcoded files, but then simply point to the old clips for rendering the output?

Thanks!

Are you getting the noise on rendered output or just in playback within Kdenlive? Playback in Kdenlive is not perfectly representative of what to expect when playing the rendered output in a media player. IOW, we have known issues with audio buffer underruns in the kdenlive playout.

"Proxy" editing is not yet available.

You were correct, it was just a problem with playback in Kdenlive! The rendered output from the test file was just fine.

However, I am now having problems with rendered output not playing correctly outside of Kdenlive. I have tried several different settings to no avail.

What is the best output format given these inputs? I want to have it go to 1080p on an upload to YouTube, and I just want the playback to be smooth in both video & audio, with no sync problems, and the quality very high. I am not tied to any particular codecs or format, I just want it to work as intended on YouTube.

Do you have any advice?

Thanks again!

1. DNxHD is a great option, but has high bitrate so you can experience cracks/pops/playback issues on the timeline (I use it on an Athlon 64x2 6000+)... Furthermore DNxHD doesn't support 50/60p so you will always end up with lower framerate... It's up to you.

2. You can try some sort of proxy editing by transcoding your clips let's say to standard definition Raw DV or AVI DV and edit them with Kdenlive, save the project and re-open it with a text editor; at this point you can batch-swap all ".dv" with ".MTS" within the text file and save the project with another name. Then you open this last modified project with Kdenlive and render it with your original files using a custom project, you can customize "720 60p" to 1080 like "ttil" suggested before (it works).

3. I don't have your camera but I'm downloading and trying to edit some raw (HDC-TM700) files in Kdenlive so yesterday I tried another good option:
you can transcode the raw files with Avidemux to MJPEG (it mantains the framerate) and then import the MJPEG files to Kdenlive on a custom 1080 60p project. Playback on the timeline is smooth (60p) and editing and rendering, well, depends on your machine ;-)

With options 2 and 3 you can have let's say a final file (mpeg4/mp4/H.264) still at 60p but edited and eventually compressed. Obviously if you render just for Youtube you don't need 50/60p but then... Why did you buy this great cam? :-)

Hope it helps and again sorry for my english...
Ignazio

Re: What is the best output format given these inputs?

H.264/AAC MP4. Bitrate to choose is kinda whatever you can afford based on file size limitations (YouTube quite liberal now), file size, and upstream bandwidth during upload. Try 8000k as a starting point.

Please describe "rendered output not playing correctly outside of Kdenlive." You seem to imply it is not smooth and there are a/v sync problems? If so, test in more than one media player (in addition to YouTube) and also try MPEG-2 - at least 12000k, maybe as high as 25000k.

no