I am the new owner of a HF100 and am very impressed by the video quality (as played back directly on my HD TV).

I have a question for vimeo.com posters. What is the bare minimum software I need to upload video clips to the vimeo website. The vimeo website HD specs say: 720p format, 1280×720, up to 30 fps.
I do not need editing, frame inserts or anything fancy. Just take a MTS file as captured by the video and convert to Vimeo
I have the lame pixela software that comes with the canon HF100, which allows exporting files as-is to 3 formats (the largest of which is 720:480, MPEG-2 resolution). The resulting video on vimeo.com is not HD quality needless to say.

Do I need to buy additional software to do this simple task? Is there anything free that will do this ?

For free you could try:

1. Encode360 to convert to 720p. Download: http://dcunningham.net/projects/encode360/

Note it does not deinterlace 60i but it comes with the K-Lite codec pack and if ffdshow is configured to play AVCHD (see ffdshow settings), then you can enable deinterlacing at playback (and encode360 will use that). Or if you shot 30p you don't have to do anything. Be careful though that installing encode360 will also install K-lite and may overwrite codecs you configured before (there might be an option to skip that, not sure).

2. Windows media encoder 9 (not much experience with that and not sure if it works)

Also someone told me that you can rename the MTS files to MPEG and directly upload to vimeo.com. But haven't tried that yet.

I suggest using three pieces of software, not all are free:

CoreAVC Professional Edition - Inexpensive AVCHD decompressor for DirectShow (required by other components)
$14.95
http://www.coreavc.com/

TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress - Can convert from AVCHD to HDV. Excellent general purpose transcoder for all kinds of tasks.
$99.95
http://tmpgenc.pegasys-inc.com/en/

MPEG StreamClip
Free transcoder that can take HDV formatted files and output 720p h.264 files for Vimeo.
http://www.squared5.com/

So the workflow is:

AVCHD file -> HDV 1280x720p30 using TMPEnc 4.0 Xpress

HDV -> h.264 1280x720p30 @ 6 Mbit using MPEG StreamClip for upload to Vimeo.

In my case, I've spent a bit more to make the files easier to edit by adding Cineform intermediate transcode to the workflow since it is much faster to edit than the raw AVCHD and higher quality than HDV. I have CoreAVC installed, use Cineform HDV to transcode from AVCHD to Cineform intermediate, edit in Vegas, export to HDV 720p30, transcode to 1280x720p30 h.264 using MPEG StreamClip for upload to Vimeo.

Here's a couple of HF10 videos I put together over the weekend. I'm very happy with the workflow and the results:

http://www.vimeo.com/972243

http://www.vimeo.com/973460

Michael, Trying to convert AVCHD from my Canon HF100 (.MTS or .M2TS files) to .M2T (HDV) format to edit in Premiere. I installed CoreAVC 14 day trial, and TMPGEnc 4.0 Express Trial version. When I open up a .MTS or .M2TS file in TMPGEnc, it doesn't recognize it. I tried re-installing, no luck. Should CoreAVC show up in TMPGEnc's Preferences under the "input/output format list"? Any tricks on "registering" the codec with TMPGEnc?

The solution sounds perfect!!! Just wish it would work for me... I've been trying to find something to convert Canon AVCHD for a long time, and this sounds perfect. I've tried Elecard converter, MainConcept, VirtualDub... nothing works yet.

Thanks! - Jim

I generally go into the CoreAVC preferences and set the "Set preferred decoder" option. You might try running the Microsoft GraphEdit utility (part of the DirectX SDK, might have to search around the web for a copy), and dragging/dropping your files on to the graph building window and see what DirectShow filters get used to render the .MTS files. If CoreAVC doesn't get used, you need to re-register the decoder and reset it as the preferred decoder.

Also, Nero Vision 5, part of Nero 8, seems pretty robust for dealing with AVCHD files from the HF10.

I've put a blog about how to create compact good quality vimeo here:

http://lucienk.spaces.live.com/blog...26635!867.entry

Examples screenshots are with tmpgenc xpress and vegas pro.
Here are 2 video's I encoded that way (tmpgenc xpress):

http://vimeo.com/1010981
http://vimeo.com/1007982

I haven't figured out yet how to get sharper video with Vegas downscaled to 720p so for now I use a 2 step process (Vegas+tmpgenc).

Regarding tmpgenc xpress with AVCHD:
- install either free k-lite codec pack or the corecodec. If you use k-lite codec pack make sure in 'ffdshow video decoder' settings that H.264/AVC is enabled.
- Tmpgenc will not list any AVCHD files. So choose all files to see those.
- AVHCD editing is very slow with tmpgenc (especially compared to vegas). I usually screen clips before drag/dropping into tmpgenc

Thanks Michael, that was it... in TMPGEnc, checking off the Direct Show in File Input list seemed to work. However, I'm not getting very good encoding yet. I'll play around with settings some more. The other problem is when I import the .M2T file into Premiere (with a Matrox RT.X2), the thumbnail shows up as a solid red frame, so there's probably something wrong with the file that's output. I downloaded an .M2T file that reportedly came from a canon mv20, and it works fine in premiere.

MainConcept did an AVCHD to DVCPRO converter just for Panasonic (free), that only works on Panasonic .MTS and .M2TS files, converts to .MXF... that would be nice if Canon would pay them to do one for the HF10/100.

TMPGEnc is slow, but at least there's something out there that seems to work. Keep the transcoding options coming!

You don't need to disable Direct Show, just make sure you disabled H.264/AVC in the ffdshow configuration (assuming you installed k-lite codec pack after CoreAVC). I do get excellent results with tmpgenc (see the tmgenc comparison with original).

I am kind of new to video conversion. I want to convert m2ts files to 720p so I can upload them to vimeo. I have downloaded a trial version of CoreAVC. I must be missing something. All I have is a Configure Codec. I don't have anything that does anything.

Am I supposed to use this in conjunction with some other program?

I've been trying to find a way to reliably convert AVCHD files (MTS) to MPG, but nothing works correctly. The best results end up with the video (from a 2 gig file, about 22 minutes recorded at the next to best quality on the Canon HF100) as about 5-10 seconds shorter than the video. (The end of the video comes out as a black screen.) As a result, the audio and video at the end of the clip are badly out of sync. And the audio is the correct length. I know the audio is the correct length because I'm working with video I recorded of a music performance, and I also recorded the audio separately so I would have excellent audio (and also connected the line output from the audio recorder to the mic input of the Canon, which worked well with the input attenuator and manual level control).

What I have tried:

1. Movie Edit Pro 14 Plus (conversion built in).

2. Elecard (demo software, since it's not for sale yet). (This seemed to do the worst job.)

3. A free video converter "Super" that seemed excellent, but still ended up with the mismatch in file length.

I suspect that all conversions are occasionally dropping a video frame, causing the shortening of the video and the out of sync situation, particularly at the end of the clip.

Although I like Movie Edit Pro and have used versions of it for many years, I just broke down and purchased Pinnacle Studio 12 Ultimate, which is supposed to edit the AVCHD files directly. Personally, I'd rather be able to run a conversion to MPG once so I would be editing with a frame based file and reduce the demands on the CPU when editing, but the audio and video need to match. Hopefully Pinnacle Studio 12 will handle the AVCHD files corrrectly.

Bob

By the way, if you're interested in the free converter, here's where to get it:

www.brothersoft.com/downloads/sp.com.html