Very 1st time with AVCHD Camcorder

Normally along with my Canon A1s, I bring along a borrowed XH-A1 which regrettably acted-up on the past 2 outings so I decided instead yesterday to give it a "rest" and substituted it with a Canon VIXIA HFS-20 which is full frame HD and 100% AVCHD.

The problem is Premiere Pro CS3.2 will not import that footage into the project so i can work on it. It's the standard MPEG-4-AVC/H.264 compression AVCHD video with an .mts extension. This format/codec is entirely new to my experience.

Bottom line: how can this material be successfully converted or otherwise be repackaged to a more compatible format without quality loss that will be recognized as a valid format by Premiere Pro CS3.2 when attempting to import it ? I'd like to see it come out preferably as .m2t footage.

The material was recorded at 25 mbps and will need to be incorporated with HDV footage. That will be addressed in a future post.

In order to use this I will need your valuable insight, knowledge and recommendations on how to proceed. All responses welcome. What would you do in my shoes?

Thanks so very much.

Get yourself Cineform Neoscene, this will give you a visual lossless convertion, can be edited in CS3 and mixed with the hdv footage.
Cineform Neoscene (http://www.cineform.com/neoscene/)

Or just use Adobe Media Encoder to convert the MTS files to m2t clips. Just use the Blu-ray preset.

Don't think the Media Encoder of CS3 supports mts.

Upgrade to CS5.5. Seriously. The performance and stability difference between the two is astounding. You won't regret it at all.

Short term solution: as Ann says - convert using Cineform Neo. They have a free fully functional trial of the encoder, and the decoder is free if you need to do more editing after the trial expires, so for this one job that's a good solution.

Longer-term solution: yes, CS5.5 rocks!

Gents,

I now have both Neoscene and CS 5.5.

Thanks for you encouragement,reccomendations and enthusiasm.

Neoscene really sucks up a lotta HD space:

A 800 meg AVCHD file converted with Neoscene grew sizewise by 700 %!!

Over 5 gigs.

I'm so new to 5.5 I haven't used 5's media encoder seperately yet.

Just the intregrated AME.

Thanks for you input.

For 5.5 you actually do not need NeoScene.
If you have a decent pc you can go native.