I have a sony high def hard drive video camera. It's a great camera with nice functions and a wonderful picture. Any good ideas on what software is good for editing the M2TS files in both SD and HD. I want to be able to export it to discs for playing in either normal DVD players, on computer, or in a blu-ray player. The PMB software that comes with the camera is an obvious choice, but it doesn't allow many options for menus, credits, or creative editing.
Also, I want to export the files to facebook or youtube. Any recommendations for that?
Editing & exporting sony handycam M2TS files
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jeffery101
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- Location: Chicago, Illinois
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acgold7
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Re: Editing & exporting sony handycam M2TS files
Mac or PC?
Macs have issues with AVCHD files but they can be worked around, and burning Blu-Rays is a challenge but it can be done.
For PC, any current version of Vegas Pro or Premiere Pro will do nicely. The consumer versions are called Vegas Movie Studio and Premiere Elements. Premiere Pro has built-in export presets for YouTube, Vimeo and all common BD and DVD formats.
You do know that regular DVD players won't play Blu-Ray discs, and DVD isn't High Def, yes? Playing a regular DVD in a BD player won't make it HD. So any disc that would play in both types of machine wouldn't be HD.
Macs have issues with AVCHD files but they can be worked around, and burning Blu-Rays is a challenge but it can be done.
For PC, any current version of Vegas Pro or Premiere Pro will do nicely. The consumer versions are called Vegas Movie Studio and Premiere Elements. Premiere Pro has built-in export presets for YouTube, Vimeo and all common BD and DVD formats.
You do know that regular DVD players won't play Blu-Ray discs, and DVD isn't High Def, yes? Playing a regular DVD in a BD player won't make it HD. So any disc that would play in both types of machine wouldn't be HD.
Adam
Re: Editing & exporting sony handycam M2TS files
Take a look at Tmpgenc
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jeffery101
- Posts: 2
- Joined: 07 Dec 2010 05:35
- Location: Chicago, Illinois
Re: Editing & exporting sony handycam M2TS files
I am familiar with the BD versus DVD difference. I'm looking for how I can capture the best quality possible from the camera on to a dvd. I know I can get bigger files if I burn to dual layer discs, I just need to keep it in a format that can be playable on most dvd players.
Re: Editing & exporting sony handycam M2TS files
Hello jeffery101, welcome!
It's a bit difficult to answer your question, as it is very broad in scope and intent.
I'll try in 3 steps nevertheless.
1. Best quality on DVD. Ordinarily, SD DVD are best with 7Mbps for video bitrate, which is roughly the highest you want to reach without risking overwhelming either the DVD specifications or the players. This will ordinarily let you fit 1h15 of video on a single-layer DVD. YMMV, so it may be 1h30 if you will, but that's roughly about it and the target you want to set for yourself.
2. AVCHD editing. How do you process 1h15 of AVCHD video, downscale it to SD DVD properly, and convert it to a DVD, so it looks good? Well, at this point in time, it seem to me that all major affordable editing suites would be rather close in terms of quality "out of the box", and the foremost question you're going to face first is: how easy is it to achieve all that, really? I suggest you take a look at this thread in the Editing forum - Which Editing package do you use? - with a few more ideas on all software editing suites that you may want to try (according to people experiences and feedback). There are free trial downloads available, so you can try and see for yourself how comfortable you feel about the whole AVCHD-to-DVD workflow with any specific editing suite you wish to try.
Here, Adam's suggestions for you to try Vegas Movie Studio or Premiere Elements do make much sense, really. These are leaders on the market. There's also Ulead Videostudio, TMPGEnc, etc... Check that thread.
3. Optimizing for one specific software suite. Once there's an editing suite that fits your preference, how do you optimize it to achieve best quality conversion? Hard to say, that depends on each software - so you'll have to find somebody proficient with that exact software you like, and discuss that matter. It does happen that sometimes people develop some very complex workflows, like exporting videos to some special format, rework it through some encoder for whatever reason, and ingest it back again into some third software to do the DVD. I did it once myself (with HDV video), still not convinced myself that it was really worth it, I'd rather think it's quite overkill and not something for you to worry about at the moment.
Does it clarify it for you here?
It's a bit difficult to answer your question, as it is very broad in scope and intent.
I'll try in 3 steps nevertheless.
1. Best quality on DVD. Ordinarily, SD DVD are best with 7Mbps for video bitrate, which is roughly the highest you want to reach without risking overwhelming either the DVD specifications or the players. This will ordinarily let you fit 1h15 of video on a single-layer DVD. YMMV, so it may be 1h30 if you will, but that's roughly about it and the target you want to set for yourself.
2. AVCHD editing. How do you process 1h15 of AVCHD video, downscale it to SD DVD properly, and convert it to a DVD, so it looks good? Well, at this point in time, it seem to me that all major affordable editing suites would be rather close in terms of quality "out of the box", and the foremost question you're going to face first is: how easy is it to achieve all that, really? I suggest you take a look at this thread in the Editing forum - Which Editing package do you use? - with a few more ideas on all software editing suites that you may want to try (according to people experiences and feedback). There are free trial downloads available, so you can try and see for yourself how comfortable you feel about the whole AVCHD-to-DVD workflow with any specific editing suite you wish to try.
Here, Adam's suggestions for you to try Vegas Movie Studio or Premiere Elements do make much sense, really. These are leaders on the market. There's also Ulead Videostudio, TMPGEnc, etc... Check that thread.
3. Optimizing for one specific software suite. Once there's an editing suite that fits your preference, how do you optimize it to achieve best quality conversion? Hard to say, that depends on each software - so you'll have to find somebody proficient with that exact software you like, and discuss that matter. It does happen that sometimes people develop some very complex workflows, like exporting videos to some special format, rework it through some encoder for whatever reason, and ingest it back again into some third software to do the DVD. I did it once myself (with HDV video), still not convinced myself that it was really worth it, I'd rather think it's quite overkill and not something for you to worry about at the moment.
Does it clarify it for you here?