Steve,
No, it's not your drives, and it's not the folder structure, it's
MC 5, which I've found to be a bit flakey importing AVCHD. I've been
working with AVCHD files from a Panasonic GH2 (1080 23.98p, 24mbps
VBR) which I believe uses the same codecs as the AF100. Here's what
I've found, working on an ancient single-core HP 8400, MC 5.5.3, using
generic bare SATA drives mounted via USB3.0:
* If you import any individual file of any length, it's got a 99%
chance of coming in fine. This takes about twice real-time, ie. 50
minutes to import a 25 min. clip & transcode to DNxHD. Everything
ends up looking fine, without the gamma problems reported with
3rd-party transcoding solutions.
* If you batch import a dozen *short* clips (of a minute or two each),
it's got a 90%+ chance of importing them fine. Once in a while the
machine will lock up hard, and you'll have to power down and reboot,
and it will look like none of the files imported. But if you look in
the media tool, there they are, just fine.
* If you batch import a dozen *long* clips you have essentially zero
chance of success. Some will come in, but then one of them will lock
up. There actually *is* a surefire indication - if you look at the
import progress bar you'll see two numbers: an elapsed time, and an
expected time to complete. If the import is working, the elapsed time
will be incrementing upward, and the expected time will be more or
less constant. But if the import has locked up, the elapsed time
*and* the expected time will both be incrementing upward, which means
you'll never get there. Now it's time to crash out, reboot MC, and
start over.
* Then when you individually import the long clip that froze, it's
fine. Don't ask me why you can import individual files, but not batch
import them all. Note that when a Panasonic AVCHD camera records
continuously it automatically chunks 4GB files, so yeah, you're always
going to see "long" clips.
I have no solution to this problem. My workaround is to simply
import small batches, by hand. Yeah, it sucks. Despite this, I
*love* my GH2 which I got last month. It makes beautiful video. The
AVCHD codec is amazingly good for such a low bit-rate. If you're
willing to deal with all the well-known limitations of the DSLR
form-factor, this camera rocks!
Cheers,
Wilson
On Fri, Sep 23, 2011 at 7:38 AM, Steve Hullfish
> I had had some success transcoding AVC HD footage from a Panasonic AF100 earlier, but I thought I was importing from it all day today, only to discover that it was really locked up the whole time (even though there was no indication.)
>
> The imports have seemed to slow to a crawl today.
>
> Does anybody use AVCHD intra footage regularly? I'm using ShotPut to copy all of the files from the cards to the RAID, then I'm opening a project in Avid MC 5.x (not 5.5) and importing... digging directly down into the folder structure to the individual clips. I started this last night and have 2 clips done and am half way through a third. I have 53 clips total from a day long shoot... I'm guessing most of the clips are about 5 minutes each... some much shorter. Very few longer than 5 minutes.
>
> This is on a octo macpro with a PCI based RAID. Snow Leopard. The RAID is getting pretty full... down to just a few dozen gigs on a 12T raid... I know that's bad. Do you think that's the issue?
>
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