Editing Software for HD Video?

January 23, 2009 11:33 AM

Looking for software with which I can read and edit raw .m2ts video files and later export them as mpeg/avi/whatever.

I recently bought a Canon Vixia HF-100 videocamera. It saves the video on an SDHC card as .m2ts files. I'd like to be able to manipulate and edit the raw files without first having to convert them into another format, figuring there would be loss of quality in the conversion. (Is quality loss even an issue? It shoots in nice-quality HD.)

I have a Mac and a PC; the PC has a much better video card, so I'd prefer to use that. Windows Movie Maker does not recognize m2ts files. I don't have the iLife suite on the Mac, so no iMovie.

I would more likely lean toward freeware or open-source software, but I am not above piracy, arrrr. (...unless editing suites are inexplicably cheap to buy.)

Thanks!

posted by not_on_display to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Response by poster: Here's a link to my only piece of video so far; all the rest of my footage so far is way too lengthy to post yet. Thus, this question. Anyway!
posted by not_on_display at 11:39 AM on January 23, 2009

If it's an AVCHD camera - particularly if the AVC (H.264) stream in question uses B-frames - you're mostly limited to cutting and pasting on keyframes in order to avoid leaving a group of pictures without the necessary keyframe anchor for the other frames. If you'd like to re-encode, your options are pretty good.

Using one of the numerous MPEG-4 Encoder GUIs developed and posted at Doom9, you can re-encode the video to MPEG-4 ASP or AVC after doing all the necessary editing. Most will also use Avisynth as the frameserver to the new video encoder, opening up all sorts of editing options. Alternately, you can try Avidemux, which I like for simple editing tasks. Avidemux can do the necessary cutting on keyframes without re-encoding and can then output the cut and/or appended AVC video and accompanying audio in a new transport stream (*.TS) or program stream (*.mpg).

While I'm generally in agreement with you as far as format conversion/loss of quality, the open-source x264 encoder is very well tuned and (depending on the recording bitrate of your camera) you may be able to get visual transparency at a far lower H.264 bitrate than the original - having already done your editing in a lossless way in the YV12 or RGB-## colorspace.

My general recommendations are as follows:
1) Throw one of the M2TS files into MediaInfo and see what type of audio you have, what AVC level the camera employs, whether interlacing flags are present, etc.

The following steps are mostly done by the MPEG-4 GUIs automagically:
2) Use DGAVCIndex to index, analyze, and frameserve your original AVC stream to Avisynth, demuxing audio with delay values automatically recorded as necessary.

3) Load the .dga file into Avisynth using DGAVCDecode and edit in whatever way you'd like, and take this opportunity to preview the output of your workflow.

4) Encode the video to an appropriate x264 profile included with the encoder GUI: generally, anything Quicktime-compatible is good (if unreasonably limited in features) for mass distribution, many of the iPod profiles will work on different types of hardware, etc. If you're keeping it for archival purposes you can re-encode to (example) one of MeGUI's "Insane" profiles appropriate for HD, though for the foreseeable future encoding to High Profile @ Level 4.1 is the most reasonable thing to do with 1080p and below.

5) Mux the edited, re-encoded video and edited (optionally re-encoded) audio to a container of your choice: Matroska, TS, M2TS, even (conditioned on a few prerequisites) a BD-9 or BD-25 AVCHD/BDMV structure ready for burning.

By the way, everything outlined above is free and most if not all of the software I've mentioned is open source (some encoder GUIs may not be open source). I particularly love MeGUI, which has been excellent for re-encoding Blu-ray and DVD movies.
posted by Inspector.Gadget at 11:53 AM on January 23, 2009 [1 favorite]

Take a look at the sony vegas products.

http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/vegaspro/compare

You would go a long way with any of them. since you work in HD the cheapest Vegas Movie Studio is not for you.

I think there are demos for them, and i am sure there is a global backup lying arround, argh.
But its well worth buying, i personally bought the platinum pro pack...

it is a little limited on the final export step, can't export to ALL formats, but has a good amount of locked presets.

Let us know what you choose.


Stephen
posted by StephenMeldalFoged at 5:20 AM on January 26, 2009

Response by poster: I'm going to investigate I.G's answer and links first and see where that leads me. Since I'm going slowly at this (I have tons of other little distractions-of-life going on, too), it may be some time before I report on the choices I've made and success I've had; I'll post results on my youtube page.

Thanks for the tips!
posted by not_on_display at 6:56 AM on January 26, 2009

Response by poster: ...and: D'oh! I finally found the editing suite that was packaged with the camera, buried amongst a whole bunch of other utilities which have variable usefulness. I'm going to mess around with that for a bit, see what happens.
posted by not_on_display at 7:21 AM on January 27, 2009