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Trimming My AVCHD Videos

Tools to trim AVCHD videos

I use two free tools to trim my AVCHD videos. The first is called tsMuxeR and the second is called Media Player Classic.

tsMuxeR is a free tool developed by SmartLabs that can trim AVCHD files. The tsMuxeR package has a graphical user interface (GUI) and a command line interface. I use the GUI to trim my AVCHD files. The processing speed is very fast. It usually takes just seconds to trim a video file on my computer with an Intel dual-core T9500 processor. In addition, as far as I can tell, there is no change in video and audio quality after trimming. However, tsMuxeR does not have a video preview function. Therefore, in order for me to determine precisely where to trim an AVCHD video, I use Media Player Classic.

Media Player Classic (MPC) is a very popular and free video player. More importantly, it has a feature that allows me to determine the time that corresponds to a particular frame in a video. Therefore, by knowing such times, I can then use tsMuxeR to trim an AVCHD video very accurately. To run MPC under Windows XP, which does not have an AVCHD codec, I need to install ffdshow which is a free AVCHD codec. To run MPC under Windows 7, which does have the AVCHD codec, I don't need to install ffdshow.

Setting up the tools

I do the following to set up tsMuxeR and MPC.

  1. Create an AVCHD working directory in, e.g., the "My Document" folder.
  2. Download tsMuxeR from here.
  3. Extract the downloaded zip file and copy the entire tsMuxeR folder to the AVCHD working directory. If the name of the extracted folder is not "tsMuxeR", rename it to "tsMuxeR".
  4. Download MPC from here.
  5. Extract the downloaded zip file and copy the mplayerc.exe file in the extracted folder to the AVCHD working directory.
  6. For my PC running Windows XP, download ffdshow from here and run the installation program to install the codec.

Trimming an AVCHD video file

I follow these steps to trim an AVCHD file:

  1. Run MPC by clicking the mplayerc.exe file in the working directory.
  2. Drag and drop an AVCHD file to the MPC GUI.
  3. Pause the video.
  4. Use the Seek Bar to go near the start time to trim the video.
  5. Press Ctrl-G (hold down the Ctrl key and press G) to bring up the "Go To" dialog box.
  6. Set the frame number to the desired frame and click Go!. MPC will now pause at the frame just specified.
  7. Press Ctrl-G to bring up the "Go To" dialog box again and record the start time (hh:mm:ss.xxx) to trim the video. This is the time corresponding to the frame specified in the previous step.
  8. Repeat Steps 4 to 7 to record the end time to trim the video.
  9. Run the tsMuxeR GUI by clicking the tsMuxerGUI.exe file in the tsMuxeR directory.
  10. Drag and drop the same AVCHD file to the tsMuxeR GUI.
  11. Click the "Split and Cut" tab from the tsMuxeR GUI.
  12. Check the "Enable cutting" box.
  13. Set the start time unit and the end time unit to "ms" (millisecond).
  14. Calculate the recorded start and end times in ms using this simple formula: (hh*3600+mm*60+ss.xxx)*1000.
  15. Enter the start and end times in ms in the tsMuxeR GUI.
  16. Click the "M2TS Muxing" radio button.
  17. Enter an output file name for the trimmed video.
  18. Click "Start Muxing" to trim the video.
  19. Play the trimmed video file.

Video

Here is a video showing the above procedure:


1 comment:

blazer003 said...

Thank you for this. I'm now using it to split my HD footage from my Panasonic GH2 and manage my media better. Some had said I could use TSMuxer for this, and this tutorial was helpful.