The Panasonic TM900 Users Thread

[Mark Evans]

Originally Posted by Tom Hardwick

Mark, if you've got Edius 6 you're up and running. You simply open the SD card and copy and paste the 'stream' files to a folder on your HDD.

Start an Edius Project (remembering that Blu-ray won't handle the 50p buts wants 50i) and simply pull the H.264/AVC files en-bloc to the timeline. After editing you click 'burn to disc' and Edius will make a DVD or BD straight off the end of the timeline. Couldn't be simpler.

tom.

Hi Tom

Sorry for not replying earlier - I have been trying things out. I don´t have the option to burn DVDs straight from the timeline as you say. It is greyed out. Do I have to choose a DVD compatible format (and if so which one?) before importing into Eduis?

I did however convert to an avi. format and reimported into Edius and then burnt a DVD but the quality was very bad!

I´lI keep trying

Thanks

Mark

[Mark Evans]

Originally Posted by Guy Caplin

I use Premier Pro CS5.5 to edit the Panasonic files. First copy the entire contents of the SD card or the camera's internal memory onto the editing computer's hard drive. Don't just try and copy across the video files. You need all of the folders and files. One of the things that is not obvious from the Adobe help files is the best way to import the files into Premier. Open the Media Browser pane and navigate to the folder where you copied the files. Select all the media files e.g. 0001.MTS etc and drag and drop them into the Project pane above. If you use any other method of importing the files you will find that a files may not be a complete 'take' and that a recording may start on one file and end on another. Using the Media Browser 'concatenates' the files - sticks the recorded segments together into one continuous file. Once you have the recorded files imported correctly, you can start editing conventionally. If you go to the editing sections on this site there is loads of stuff on editing with Adobe and Vegas.

Hi Guy

I will give it a go when I get a better handle on Premiere. Re: Importing into premiere what settings should I use as it doen´s seem to have 1080 50P available?

Thanks

Mark

[Tom Hardwick]

Mark - Edius (as it says on the box) will edit anything, so go ahead. If the burn2disc is greyed out it means your project settings are incompatible with DVD or BD, so simply export the timeline as a Canopus HQ avi file, open a fresh new project (1080i for BD or DVD), pull in this new avi and you'll find the burn 2disc is now ok.

You can use any sort of disc you like, DVD-R, DVD+R, RW, double layer, 25 or 50 gig BD.

The disc authoring software looks simple but in fact it allows you to have moving menu backgrounds with music, hidden chapters, have the menu completely invisible unless the DVD's remote calls it up and so on.

tom.

[Mark Evans]

Tom

I found this edius tips website and followed the instructions:

Easy Editing With Edius 6.0: Making a DVD from your HD Project

I used 720x576 50i as suggested on edius tips but on burning to a DVD the quality was very bad.

Are you saying that I should open a 1920x1080 50i project, insert the Canopus HQ .avi file and then burn the DVD? I´ll try it tonight.

Mark

[Tom Hardwick]

Yes Mark - do that (your last sentence) The Edius6 MPEG2 converter works excellently as so it should - way back in 2005-ish the Canopus Storm II's MPEG encoder was the biz when used with Premiere 6.5.

When you make a DVD straight from the timeline it oddly defaults to mpeg audio, so untick the 'auto' box in settings and make it AC3. Leave the rest on auto as it'll choose (quite rightly) a CBR of 8 mbps single pass for any film under an hour to DVD-R.

The resulting DVDs are most excellent, and when upscalled by a BD player in a big modern TV, look grand.

Sounds like what you've been doing is down-converting the 1080 timeline to SD (720 x 576) and then doing a second conversion to MPEG2 for the DVD. This double conversion process is a no-no and is giving you the so-so results you describe.

tom.

[Mark Evans]

Tom. OK I´m using 1920x1080i in project settings (which automatically uses upperfield), but I cannot find where you set the auto box to AC3. (I also don´t understand what CBR is but as you say its automatic I guess I don´t really need to!). Also I gather you are saying it is best not to exceed one hour for a DVD?

Mark

[Tom Hardwick]

OK, project settings are good, so 'burn to disc' won't be greyed out. Click burn to disc and choose if you want to make a DVD or BD. In 'settings' in this authoring program you'll see the audio and video is set to auto. Untick that to enable you to change the audio to AC3. I'd leave video on auto as Edius will encode at the highest possible bit-rate for however long your film is.

One hour on a DVD will give you the best image quality the medium's capable of, but 90 mins on a DVD looks excellent too.

tom.

[Clayton Moore]

Originally Posted by Mark Evans

Hi Guy

I will give it a go when I get a better handle on Premiere. Re: Importing into premiere what settings should I use as it doen´s seem to have 1080 50P available?

Thanks

Mark

In premier I would right click (control click on a mac) and choose "new sequence from clip" and let premier create your sequence settings. My guess is it will create what you want. Working in the NTSC environment, 5.5.2 has an AVCHD 1080-60p setting, Id guess in PAL it would have, or create a 50p setting as well.

I can edit in premier with my (NTSC) 60fps just fine. The file I export from premier using "match sequence settings" I can use in either Adobe's or Apple's software to create a really fine looking blu ray.

Its true weather I burn a standard DVD or Blu Ray that THOSE standards will always rachet down the frame rate as they don't support a 60p standard. Still the results are really beautiful and sharp and clean.

Once I get my file out of Premier I really just create a DVD the way I create any DVD but with footage thats much cleaner to start out with.

[Mark Evans]

Tom

I just did a clip to the hard disk and it looks OK. It isn´t 50P but if I had never seen it in 50P I would probably be happy! My default for the saound is AC3 so I did not need to change it. By the way, do you know the best format for exporting to a Multimedia drive (Western digital) would be? Would 50i be the best it can reproduce?

Thanks a lot for the help. It is easy with some help! I´m from Southend originally by the way. Not far from Billericay!

Mark

[Tom Hardwick]

'I just did a clip to the hard disk and it looks OK' doesn't mean much to me.
If you're exporting to a HDD there's no point in downgrading the image at all, so keep it 50p.

[Clayton Moore]

Playing back full 1080 50P at full res and full frame rate, depending on the codec you use and your computer hardware will yield varying results. What I mean by that is, some computer systems are not fast enough to decode (playback) a file like that and play perfectly smoothly. Playing at a full 50 frames per sec progressively takes some computer muscle. Right now the standard appears to be H264 files, similar to what you get from the iTunes store ((except those are not 50 or 60p files)).

I have used this software ( only for mac ) Pavtube Video Converter-best software to convert WMV, AVI, TiVo, MKV, AVCHD MTS files.
That software supports AC3 btw.
and it seems to work fine with 60p. Im able to get expectable playback even on just a two core machine.

[Mark Evans]

Originally Posted by Tom Hardwick

'I just did a clip to the hard disk and it looks OK' doesn't mean much to me.
If you're exporting to a HDD there's no point in downgrading the image at all, so keep it 50p.

Tom

I mean that it doesn´t look like 50P quality. It looks like DVD and therefore OK. Probably it is the best that can be got in DVD format. Its just thst if you have seen the 50P version you become spoilt and nothing else compares!

Unfortunately I cannot yet get 50P to play on my MM Hard disk outputting to a television.

Mark

[Claire Watson]

Mark, as you have a Western digital disk for "outputting to a television" you can keep the full frame rate 50P output from Edius for this, thus enjoying it's fabulous full quality! That's what I do with my personal stuff, I make a 1080P/50 project in Edius 6, edit the film and export to mpeg2 to put on my WD TV® Live Hub™ for viewing on my HDTV or taking to friends and showing on theirs.

You can make a 50P project in Edius quite easily, here's my project settings..

Video
Frame Size : 1920 x 1080
Frame Rate : 50.00
Aspect Ratio : 1.0000
Field order : Progressive
Quantization Bit Rate : 8Bit
Audio
Sampling Rate : 48000Hz
Quantization Bit Rate : 24 Bit
Channel : 2
Setup
Render format : Canopus HQ Standard
Over Scan Size : 0 %
Audio Reference Level : -12.0dB

When you have completed the edit go to "Print to File" and in the left pane of this screen highlight "MPEG", then in the r/h pane double click "MPEG2 Program Stream". The MPEG settings window will open.

For the Basic settings tab leave Size at "Current Setting", Quality/Speed choose "SuperFine", Bitrate use CBR 35000000 and for Audio choose AC3. In the Extended settings tab, Field order should be "Progressive", Chroma Format 4:2:0, Profile MP@HL, GOP IBBP, Picture count 15 (for PAL) and put a tick in the Closed GOP checkbox.

This will produce a single file, video and audio combined, just what you need for the media box and the quality is amazing because you have not thrown out half the pixel information by converting to 25P (50i actually I believe which is what you would need to put on Blu ray or DVD).

Roll on the day when we might be able to put 1080P/50 or 60 on Blu ray...

[Mark Evans]

Hi Claire

Did everthing you said - works perfectly! Quality superb!

Thanks a lot for the help (and in so much detail).

Mark

[Claire Watson]

Hi Mark, pleased to have helped.

Since I got the TM900 over a year ago it's taken me a while to get to this stage where I can archive and replay recordings from it fairly easily while retaining the original 50P quality. Yes 35Mbps MPEG2 from Edius is normally sufficient for the TM900 in 50P mode... plus Edius rocks exporting it, 8 cores of my i7 processor pegged at 100%, all the way through!

50Mbps is better still, I do a lot of fine detail work so sometimes have used this data rate and never found any playback difficulties from either the media box to telly or on the computer, I can recommend a great free player for the computer if you have stuttering problems with others, it's called "Splash Lite" and is freeware.

The disadvantage of using 50Mbps is that file sizes gets bigger, one can always connect an external drive to the WD media player box of course, but for ultimate quality together with smaller file sizes I find x264 format absolutely the best. Edius 6 cannot export in this format so I export a temporary Canopus Lossless AVI file to feed to my x264 encoder.

The quality of x264 is astonishing.. I have often put the result above the original in the Edius timeline and can discern no difference toggling between the two which is very reassuring. BTW I am not looking at computer screens here but on my large screen HDTV connected via Edius/Storm 3G hardware running at proper full 50P, not interlaced or converted in some way.

The only disadvantage I find in producing x264 is that takes much more time than simply churning out MPEG2 direct from Edius timeline but I do find it's worth the effort for really important stuff.