Rewrapped (non-transcoded) MTS files hard to playback
 

I have some 1080i MTS files shot with an unknown Sony Cam. CW does a great job of rewrapping, but they are difficult to preview. The rewrapped clips play fine in Quick Look and Quick Time. However scrubbing causes Quick Look and the containing folder to close. In QuickTime scrubbing causes the video to freeze, but the audio keeps going. In compressor if you try to scrub the clip to select In and Out points Compressor crashes. I'm using Compressor to transcode to DVCPro HD 1080 30P with great success, however there are a lot of clips and I need to scrub through to preview which clips are worth transcoding. Any suggestions? Thanks.

You could try playing them back with VLC (VideoLAN - VLC: Free streaming and multimedia solutions for all OS!) but it may have issues as well.

Do you happen to have Perian installed? Sometimes it helps, sometimes it hurts when playing back h264, so if you don't have it, it's worth a go, and if you have it, it's worth trying to uninstall it (in system preferences).

If this is an older computer, scrubbing may just be slow no matter what, though it shouldn't be causing crashes. Decomping the super long gop h264 from avchd is pretty hard on a cpu.

Thanks Colin:
I have VLC and I'll give that a try. Alas, nothing is more convenient than using Quick looks as you can arrow down and browse the files without having to opening anything. Also some of the clips only have ten or 12 seconds of usable footage and it would be nice in Compressor to mark the in/out to save encoding time and space without a crash.

I uninstalled Perian when I began to work with these files on Friday.

The machine is a late 2008, 2.8 GHz, eight core with 4 Gigs of memory. The hard drive is a seven drive XServe RAID. My system should be up to the task.

Do you get a crash log when Quicklook crashes? I'd be curious to see what's actually crashing. If you get one ("X program has unexpectedly quit" -> show details) you could send it to dmsupport@divergentmedia.com and we could see which component is dying.

No crash log with Quick Look, but probably a crash log with Compressor. When I get into the office tomorrow I'll give it a try. No crash in QuickTime, just a freeze in the video track. Thanks for the info.