I am using a AVCHD camera (Canon HF S100) for my video source material. For now at least most of my video out is going to be the Vimeo rendering for display on YouTube or Vimeo.

It seems the editing process would be quicker and smoother if I editing the clips in an intermediary format. See TMM's post http://kdenlive.org/forum/info-how-use-avchd-files-hd-camcorders for one way of doing this.

I am looking for suggestions for the intermediary format to use and any other workflow/editing tips that would be related.

The original clips from the camera will be retained, disk space is not yet an issue. I'm looking for something easy on the system that will display as cleanly as possible in the project monitor preview screen.

Resolution:

Two good choices:

Use the Transcode option from the file menu to convert your clip to DNxHD. DNxHD is an open format created by Avid for the express purpose of multi generation NLE.

Use mencoder to convert your clip to ljpeg format as described by TMM's post on AVCHD working.

The DNxHD version takes about 50% as much drive space as the ljpeg.
It is probably possible to create a ljpeg profile for the Transcode menu option. Out of scope for this thread.

In my personal experience these alternate formats allow faster editing with artifact free previewing of clips, project and effeccts on my platform (AMD phreon dual core CPU with 8GB ram) making it worth the temporary drive space.

I have a canon HF10 and am doing quite the same as you.

I convert all my .MTS in the DVD format, encapsulated in avi with a script.
I started with the m2tstoavi script and adapted to my needs.
I think you can inspire yourself from my script to have an output for Vimeo or Youtube.
You can namely optimise your resolution to the recomandations of those web sites.

Personally I retained the dvd format so that I can burn a DVD summary of the whole year.
So I always make 2 outputs of my mixed videos: one for Vimeo and the other in DVD format (.vob).

I'm not a guru... nevertheless, here my script (see attachment).

Go in the terminal to the directory where you downloaded the script, modify it and execute this command:
sudo cp m2tstodvdavi /usr/local/bin/ && sudo chmod a+rx /usr/local/bin/m2tstodvdavi

After that in the terminal go to the directory containing your .MTS and execute:
m2tstodvdavi *.MTS
and all your *.MTS will be converted. The original file is not erased.
Be patient...


EDIT: you have to rename the file to "m2tstodvdavi" as this web site does not allow files without extension.

Hey Calvin,

You may have gotten better response by starting a new thread. People aren't likely to come here to help with HG10 information.

Having said that...

As you know your camera stores video in AVCHD format files. You're offered four bitrates to choose from: HXP (15Mbps), XP (9Mbps), SP (7Mbps), and LP (5Mbps). The higher the number the greater the quality - shoot some tests for side by side viewing to see the difference.

You don't need to do any special settings for kdenlive to import your videos. Just add them as clips. You may want to use mediainfo (or other similar command) to verify that your camera produces 1440x1080 60i and use a profile supporting that.

As to output setting for the best, most professional look...
well that depends on the target platform and what kind of professional is being emulated.

DVD vs Online vs Theater presentations have widely different requirements. And while I'm a fan of Robert Rodriquez (sample: 10 Minute Cooking School) and want to puke at local TV news footage, they're both pros doing great work (and the news guys on a daily basis) that I can only aspire to.

So those output settings are something that each person needs to determine on their own.

If storage is no problem and if you want to preserve absolutely as much fidelity and resolution as possible consider the DNxHD codec. It uses about 13 time the disc space of AVCHD 17Mbps, but it's near lossless, and Kdenlive handles it quite well on my decent dual core machine. I'm pretty much using it exclusively for all my editing from a Canon HF-100 and it's very stable.

In fact, Kdenlive 0.7.5 has a built in transcode function. You can just import your clip, highlight them all in the Project Tree clip window, right click and hit Transcode. (This takes a long time.)

If you don't see the codec as an option, go to Settings | Download new render profiles, you should see it. It was added specifically - "Try this if Kdenlive is having trouble with performance or seeking on your AVCHD footage."

Once you have the profile and codec, you may also have to make sure it is set as the transcode profile so you can do the right click thing. Go to Settings | Configure Kdenlive | Transcode and if it's not there already, add a profile called "DNxHD 1920x180" and set the ffmpeg code to
-s 1920x1080 -r pal -b 220000k -threads 2 -vcodec dnxhd -acodec copy %1.mov

Any other questions, DNxHD has been discussed elsewhere on these forums, do a search.

That's the kind of suggestion I was looking for. Is ffmpeg doing the background work? (judging by the -r option that is missing in melt and mencoder this seems to be the case)

In that case US based people need to change pal to ntsc.

US people should change the DNxHD line,check what is in the Render profile. I don't think the PAL or NTSC bit is actually necessary. For me it is actually:

s=1920x1080 aspect=@16/9 b=220000k vcodec=dnxhd acodec=pcm_s16le %1.mov

This will make the audio uncompressed, though I'm not sure if that will really help that much. You could leave the audio to copy as in the previous example, in which case it the line would be:

s=1920x1080 aspect=@16/9 b=220000k vcodec=dnxhd acodec=copy %1.mov

I think these will work.

My camera records to SDHC cards, and I just transfer the MTS files over on a USB card reader rather than plug the camera in. Actually I can load these just fine in Kdenlive and edit them, but seeking/scrubbing back and forth is not good at all, and trimming the beginning of clips can give bad results. So I just do the DNxHD thing and all is good.

Of course this may change in the next release due in a couple of weeks, they are working pretty hard on smoother AVCHD. Ideally the whole transcode issue will be unnecessary at some point not too far off.

Version 0.7.6 has an expanded list of DNxHD Transcode presets suitable for 60i/30p. Also, for <1080, there is a Lossless Matroska preset (HuffYUV for video and FLAC for audio).