AVCHD mts file home movie conversion...how?

[Monteplus3]

Hello, I've backed up many many BD movies to hard drive for playing on the WD TV, no issues.  Where I have run into a brick wall, though, is transferring my home movies taken off my Canon HF S100 camcorder to a hard drive.  This is HD footage and the stream file is comprised of around 129 mts files.  I would like to combine other mts files with the ones off this file as well to make one video(vacations on two separate SD cards, or partial events on two or more cards). I don't care about the file size so I don't care about compressing the files; I just want high quality in one continuous video.

I've tried Vegas Pro and PowerDirector; not only is this process tedious but the result is not as good as the orginal footage (I've tried a number of output settings). In fact, the quality ends up quite poor. I'm not interested in editing the footage; I just want to transfer it to my hard drive in one continuous video file in the same quality that I shot it in.

When I play the files through my BD player directly off of the SD card, the image quality is stunning.  But, every time i have tried to transfer the files to a portable HD and play them through the WD player, something falls apart. I'm running Windows 7 on a quad core i7 chip, 6 gigs of RAM.

Can anyone give me some step-by-step information on how best to accomplish what I am after?  If I just copy the files straight from the SD card to the hard drive, the WD only plays one mts file at a time.  Sorry if my question is academic, but I'm stumped. I've scanned all the forum information but don't see anything specific to my particular issue. Thanks in advance.

[moscka]

I use eac3to to merge the files by command prompt, but it has a GUI now:
http://forum.videohelp.com/threads/306677-tsMuxer-and-joining-m2ts-files?p=1886621&viewfull=1#post1886621
http://www.videohelp.com/tools/eac3to

If you want to convert, the only software that works is CyberLink PowerDirector.
All the other ones I tried resulted a unsynchronized file.

[Monteplus3]

Thanks, can you tell me what settings you used to output on PowerDirector?  Are you doing the same as me...converting mts files?  Thanks again!

[jayallan]

You can also use Adobe Premiere CS4 or later.   Once the files are edited you can output as an MOV or MKV or if you want no compression as an AVI. 

I have tried all the above and they work fine with my AVCHD files.

[oposky2006]

Thanks, can you tell me what settings you used to output on PowerDirector?  Are you doing the same as me...converting mts files?  Thanks again!

well, i have done such thing. I converted some footage files and merged them into one file so that i can play in one continuous video file. I used Pavtube Video Converter which recommended by my friend to convert and merge video files to mkv format. The quality is great. It offers me "a good and  whole movie".

[Monteplus3]

Thanks for the replies everyone.  Yesterday I managed to take the mts files and merge them together with tsMuxer and the video was perfect...no loss in quality at all.  The file played without a problem on my WD, except for an occasional stutter here and there (the screen would flash to black and then re-appear...this happened a few times during the first few minutes then stopped. 

My main issue, though, is that the sound is out of sync.  Peope speak and the words lag a few seconds.  Can someone steer me the right direction to correct this?  If I can correct that one issue, I'll be all set!

Thanks again.

[KAD]

tsmuxer is a great program, one of the main ones I use, if audio is out of sync with tsmuxer, you could try adjusting the framerate of either the audio or video, I've never used the advanced options in tsmuxer, but you might be able to do it with that. for audio conversions I've used eac3to, there's actually 2 gui's available, one is called eac3to and more gui, it will also work tsmuxer and alot of other programs through this gui, forgot where I downloaded maybe doom9.org forum, but you can change anything you can think of as far as audio is concearned

KAD

[Monteplus3]

tsmuxer is a great program, one of the main ones I use, if audio is out of sync with tsmuxer, you could try adjusting the framerate of either the audio or video, I've never used the advanced options in tsmuxer, but you might be able to do it with that. for audio conversions I've used eac3to, there's actually 2 gui's available, one is called eac3to and more gui, it will also work tsmuxer and alot of other programs through this gui, forgot where I downloaded maybe doom9.org forum, but you can change anything you can think of as far as audio is concearned

KAD

Thanks, I downloaded the "eac3to and more" gui.  I'll see what I can do with it this afternoon, but at first glance I must admit it looks a little daunting.  With all the great tools out there, it really does seem like someone would create a very easy to follow step-by-step tutorial to go with them so they can be used to their full potential by the "masses," or used at all for that matter.  I've yet to find one...the closest I've seen was a tutorial for Clown BD off the Slysoft forum.  Thanks again for the advice.

[KAD]

well, I'll be brief but first page of that gui you point it to the .exe files for whatever programs you're going to use with it, you also select output destination and select input file

go to the tab for program you want to use, first load the file, I know you loaded on first page but now load it on the tab, then select all your settings, click add to batch listing, when you're done, go to batch listing tab, click run batch, you'll notice a small black cmd promt will start running, it will not look like it's doing much, but it is working, the cmd promt will disappear when process is completed

KAD

[juniorgamer]

im well aware of that which is why i still buy CDs, however if they sold FLAC is would be perfect because i would be able to get them instantly instead of waiting 1-2 days. and then i just convert copys to MP3 if i cared to, which is what i do now