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I have a camera (Panasonic Lumix GF-1) that outputs "AVCHD Lite" files, 720p h264 in a MTS container. I saw this question that said Movie Maker in Windows 7 supports AVCHD...but I just tried, and unfortunately it does not support AVCHD Lite.

Are there any free or inexpensive non-linear video editors (NLE) that can natively handle AVCHD Lite files, without requiring some 3rd party driver? If not, are there any 3rd party drivers that are especially stable? (In my experience they usually have some problems...I got AVCHD Lite loading into VirtualDub using a 3rd party plugin, but it's very slow and sometimes crashes, and seeking takes ages.

Community
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davr
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4 Answers4

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Adobe Premiere Elements 8 supports it. It's lowish cost and you can do a a 30 day evaluation if you want to test it first. I'm using it to edit Panasonic TZ7 videos (AVCHD Lite).

Note that there is no difference in the actual files of AVCHD vs AVCHD Lite - it simply defines the resolution and framerate.

EDIT: I was doing some more editing last night and I've found a cheaper solution which seems to work very well:

http://www.avs4you.com/AVS-Video-Editor.aspx

This is about half the price of Premiere Elements, and although not as fully featured, it seems much easier to use. I didn't even need to press the help key to achive everything I wanted. It seems it can also upload directly to YouTube if you want it to and I noticed no quality loss on the edited video when saving in "HD Video 720p" DivX format.

There's a list of more editing software here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVCHD#Editing

NickG
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You'll have a much easier life if you convert the AVCHD Lite files (.mts) to another format. You may then use any video editor you like, including VirtualDub (I would in your place try to see if VirtualDub and FFDSHOW can together handle mts).

Some conversion programs that claim .mts capabilities are:
Format Factory
VLC media player can transcode MTS files

harrymc
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The best codec I've found so far for AVCHD is CoreAVC

It's not free, but it's quite cheap ($13), and it correctly interprets more AVCHD files than any other codec I've found (including ones that come with very software packages like Sony Vegas, Ulead Video Studio, etc.).

A pretty-good one that's free is ffdshow-tryouts:

You'll have to try it out on your camera's videos to see if it works. If your camera encodes the videos as true 720p frames, it should be fine. If your camera plays dirty tricks with interlacing the progressive content, then you may need to use CoreAVC.

If you'll be doing any non-trivial amount of editing, you might want to first transcode to a another format like huffyuv, mpeg1, or mpeg2 (all supplied with ffdshow-tryouts), using very high compression settings. It'll look awful but be fast for seeking. Create the edit list with the highly compressed video, then process the original when you're ready.

If you like a basic GUI that's very robust, VirtualDub (virtualdub.org) is great. Adobe Premiere is a nice product if you really need the more advanced features it offers. If you prefer command-line tools, check out mencoder and/or ffmpeg.

Mr Fooz
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If you find a program that remux from .mts to .mkv without re-encoding (it is fast and you won't lost quality) then you can open it directly in VirtualDub with the Matroska input plugin: http://forums.virtualdub.org/index.php?act=ST&f=7&t=12664

ale5000
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