HomeOften I set up one or more cameras at an event and let them roll, sometimes for hours, in anticipation that something interesting might occur in that camera’s field of view in the next couple of hours. Out of all those hours there might only be a few minutes I really want to keep.
I use Sony Vegas Pro for video editing and it has a built-in trimmer just for the purpose of extracting bits from a larger clip BUT it cannot save the extracted bits losslessly. It can “render” them into a variety of formats with very little loss and generally excellent results but always SOME SLIGHT BUT DISCERNIBLE LOSS, enough to notice if you look closely. So I don’t want to render any clip more than once and I always need to start with the original footage if I want optimal quality. The problem with original footage is, because I usually shoot in the highest quality possible (1080p full HD), they bite up too much space and I lack the hard drive space to save out these huge files to disk.
While the software that comes packaged with new cameras can sometimes do pretty much the same kind of basic editing, it is almost always restricted to editing the files made by that particular camera. Even within the Panasonic line of AVCHD cameras, the software that works with the files made by one model won’t work with the files made by another model. If you only have one camera that is okay perhaps but what of a family with four different Panasonic video cameras, each of which came packaged with a similar but incompatible little editing program it makes that software essentially useless. And it doesn’t work with the HD videos made by Sony or other brands!
Hence I come into the below question: is there any software that can trim/split AVCHD videos footage by Sony, Canon and Panasonic camcorders in a lossless way?
If you’re getting stuck with the same situation, I’d glad to share with you the Pavtube Media Magician software, which does lossless trimming/splitting/joining of AVCHD files at lightening fast speed. Media Magician comes with a camera wizard that allows you to quickly backup AVCHD shootings from most cameras- including digital cameras (Canon Vixia, Panasonic Lumix), HDD based camcorders (Sony Handycam, Panasonic HD, JVC Everio, etc) and flash drive cameras to HDD and conduct a few limited special effects. This is not a substitute for full-featured video editing software if your goal is professional looking videos. If you’re just doing home movies of summer vacation for the family, and you want to take an hour’s footage and extract only five minutes’ worth for fun, this makes it very quick and easy to do that.
Why I like it:
1. LOSSLESS TRIMMING of AVCHD and clip extraction
It allows one to LOSSLESSY trim long video clips in MTS MT2S MOD and TOD formats.
Guide: Lossless trimming and clip extraction from AVCHD and AVCHD Lite HD videos
2. FORMAT CONVERSION.
While it can’t do totally lossless trimming of MP4 and MOV files, it can “convert” them after trimming to the native format (as in starting with an MOV file, trimming it, and exporting it as a smaller MOV file) with so little loss I can’t tell the difference in 1920 x 1080 HD original file on a 23 inch HD monitor a foot from my face.
Guide: Trim and convert 1920 x 1080 HD recordings to view on HD TV
3. Lighting fast SPEED
Media Magician loads very quickly and converts very quickly, faster than anything I’ve ever seen and it does make some use of multiple core CPUs.
4. EASE OF USE
The controls are well laid out and quite clear and because there are so few, even if you just do “trial and error” to see what each does. In that sense it would be good for beginners, because they would quickly get satisfying results.
Guide: Getting started with Pavtube Media Magician
Free Trial Media Magician
