I’ve been shooting quite a bit of video lately with the Panasonic GH-1. It’s a great little camera, especially at 720p. It shares the same downside as it’s little brother, however, the GF-1. It uses the AVCHD format instead of recording its H.264 output into a more reasonable format, like a QuickTime .mov file. This makes the ingest and file management side of the equation a bit nastier than it should be.
Either you can go dumpster diving into the directory structure of the card and grab the .mts files—assuming that your video editing solution supports .mts files. Some do, some don’t. Or, you can use iMovie or Final Cut Pro’s Log & Transfer function to import the video from your card. Except, when you do that, Apple’s products transcode the files into huge ProRes or AIC files. Great for editing, but bad for disk space and archiving purposes.
ClipWrap from divergent media gives nice a way out of this mess. You can use it to turn AVCHD files into QuickTime movies. Even better, since AVCHD uses H.264, ClipWrap doesn’t have to transcode. Instead, it pops the H.264 data out of the .mts files and stuffs it into a QuickTime container. I’m sure it’s slightly more complicated than that when you get into the details, but that’s the general idea. And it works well.
I was a bit hesitant to give ClipWrap a try because their FAQ explicitly mentions that they don’t have full support for the specific version of H.264 that the GH1 uses. However, the trial version seemed to work, so I dove in and haven’t had any problems. It could be since I’m shooting only at 720p and not 1080p, I’m not tickling the problem. Maybe I’ve just been lucky so far. In any case, I hope they’ll get to the bottom of things soon.
Until GH-1 support is official, I can’t fully endorse it but I did go ahead and purchase it since it is solving a problem for me right now. But, it’s certainly the right kind of product to solve this problem and if you’re using an AVCHD camera, you should take a look.