Advanced Import from Videocamera

[Kostiantyn Rybnikov]

Hi!
I've got a camera which has kind of this struct:
AVCHD/
  BDMV/
    .../
    STREAM/
      00000.MTS
      00001.MTS
      00002.MTS
      00003.MTS
      ...

So these *.MTS files are actually a movies. And to import it you can simply copy it to your hard drive. But there are some problems with that.

1. It's not so simple for users, would be better to have openshot button "import from camera" that shows all videos with previews and dates, asks where to import (sometimes it's a hard drive).
2. Cameras use fat32 (I think) and when video is too large -- it's splitted to 2Gb files. So when importing you should find 2Gb files as 1 video and do "cat 00003.MTS >> 00002.MTS" on import or something like that.

Hope that one day I will start implementing this feature myself :-)

[Olivier Girard (eolinwen)]

Hi,
Your structure is this one of a Blu-ray disc. I ll tag in the wishlist and thus it will not lost in the bug tracker.
About the format I 'll said more that in NTFS instead of Fat32.
And it is perfect if you can implement that.
Thanks.

[Olivier Girard (eolinwen)]

is it the mark of your camera is not a Canon or a Panasonic by chance ?

[Kostiantyn Rybnikov (k-bx)]

It's Sony

[Tobias Holm (p-launchpad-eftprod-com)]

Hi!

I have a Sony CAM which produces .MTS files as you're describing. It's no problem to import all those files into OpenShot and then import them to the timeline by right-clicking on them.

If the files are split up they are placed in the timeline right after each other so this shouldn't be any problem?

Well, an option for copying the video files from a CAM (memory card) could be nice, but it's not much more trouble copying the files directly in the file manager? In Ubuntu you see all MTS files as thumbnails too in the file manager (Nautilus).

Regards, Tobias

[moimael (moimael)]

YOu should take a look at dmedia, the media import library developped by the novacut team but intended to be used by other programs. It seems to exactly do what we need !

[Kostiantyn Rybnikov (k-bx)]

Tobias Holm,

Well, the biggest problem is that it splits 2Gb files, so you need to ``cat`` them into one. And for me that's not a problem, but for my girlfriend it is :-) Also to copy those files you need to find them first. And again -- it's not a problem for me, but for my girlfriend it's so much easier in iMovie to just see "hey, I see your camera, here's a list of previews of videos in it, choose those you want to import".

Also, of course, if your camera is making high definition videos it would be nice to convert it to some smaller format, but that's another bug (maybe in future).