AVCHD, Final Cut Pro, and Apple Power Mac G5...
 

Hi guys,

I have just bought a Panasonic TM300. I've installed Final Cut Pro, and have tried importing clips into the Power Mac G5 (dual 1.8ghz). Anyway, it comes up with a message saying that AVCHD isn't supported on Power PC based Macs :-( Does anyone know a way around this, or do I have to buy an Intel based Mac Pro?

Thanks in advance of any help offered.

Best regards,

Mike.

AVCHD is only supported on Intel CPU MSCs. There is no workaround that. Here is an excerpt from the manual:" AVCHD support is available only on Intel-based Mac computers." Sorry.....

You can use this program to convert your material to AIC

VoltaicHD | AVCHD, high definition, video converter, QT, Movie Maker, WMV HD | ShedWorx

It´s free to try

Clipwrap will soon come out with Clipwrap2 and they will convert AVCHD to a format you can use.

You can also use Tost 9/10 to convert the material.

So you see there are solutions.

The only thing you can´t do with you computer is using imovie or FCE/FCP to do the conversion, but as you see there is no need for that, when you can use other programs for the conversion


Cheers

Hans

Thanks for the replies guys... Toast 10 seems to convert it ok, but it seems to have to write the clips to a DVD, which can then be imported back into FCP. Quality seems good though. All I have to do now, is figure out how to use FCP ;-)

Best regards,

Mike.

I know this is an old thread but I wanted to say, you do not have write to a DVD. My friend creates a folder on his computer and simply has Toast save the newly created files to to that folder. I'm considering a G5 set-up and this is how we'd be working.

-Nate

import using the log and transfer and transcode to Apple ProRes 422

I'm talking about on G5 Macs.

-Nate

AVCHD, FCP and PowerMacs...
 

Voltaic is very, very useful. It can transcode AVCHD directly into ProRes 422, but another great thing is that it can detect when there are pulldown fields (when original material was shot at 24p and encoded into 60i, the way Canon Vixia and some others do it), and during the transcoding process, remove the pulldown fields and re-compose original 24p frames inside that ProRes file.

ClipWrap, on the other hand, does NOT convert anything. It just re-wraps MTS (or M2TS) files into a standard QuickTime container. Since AVCHD is encoded in H.264, which is perfectly well supported by QuickTime, ClipWarp 2 just extracts the actual audio and video stream from the MTS container and shoves it into a QuickTIme MOV container, without any transcoding. You get a file that's playable in any application that supports QuickTime (including iMovie, FCE and FCP). In other words, you get to edit original footage (not original files, since ClipWrap copies them while re-wrapping, but there's no decompression/re-compression involved).

If you computer is capable enough to handle raw AVCHD playback, you might be able to do simple edits on ClipWrap-rewrapped files.

I am definitely looking at Voltaic, but ClipWrap 2 doesn't do so well for long projects (from what I've been told) and I'll be doing a lot of effects work too.

-Nate