Is there any plug in available that will permit linking of some old m2t and m2ts files?  If not what format should they be transcoded to that will allow them to be linked?

Thanks,

Denny

Are they contained within a larger folder structure that's still intact, copied from the original camera files?

If so, you should be able to link to that wider structure.

Otherwise, re-wrapping (no transcode) to an MOV wrapper is a good idea.  On the Mac, EditReady is a great tool because it keeps spanned clips together, keeps timecode intact, and more.  But I don't know of a good equivalent for Windows that has the same feature set.

There are lots of tools out there that purport to do it, some of which get posted on these forums from time to time, but they're also familiar from the old (and still very relevant) 2010 Macworld article "Speaking with spammers." I still know of no good, reputable tool for Windows that'll do this rewrap AND keep multi-file single clips intact, rewrapped, with timecode.

Problem Solved

I dug out an old program called Dali's Mustache and started experimenting.  Wrap to MOV did not work at all for link, the icon image of the clip didn't even show up in Source Browser.  After several other attempts, I found that convert to MPEG MXF worked very well.

Yeah, I'd thought of Dali's Mustache / HD Cinematics, but I know it hasn't been updated in a couple of years now.  But if you have it and it works for you, great!

dmfreeman:

Problem Solved

I dug out an old program called Dali's Mustache and started experimenting.  Wrap to MOV did not work at all for link, the icon image of the clip didn't even show up in Source Browser.  After several other attempts, I found that convert to MPEG MXF worked very well.

Denny - does that rewrap the M2T (MPEG-2) or does it transcode to MPEG MXF?

I have an old Sony FX1 that records to tape and I purchased a little box that lets me record M2T files directly to a memory card, skipping the record-to-tape step. I would love to have been able to link to these M2T files in MC but the next best thing for these is that MC will fast import them (basically it rewraps them into MXF files on import without any reencoding). The only difference with the fast import is that the files are decomposed into separate video and audio files. I'm not sure with 2019.6 whether we can tell MC to create MXF Op1a files during this operation (I haven't tried that yet).

As for the AVCHD flavour of these - I have no experience with rewrapping them...

Cheers

It transcodes to an MXF file.  It is faster than real time, and the results look good.  The program was free or for a small donation as I recall. Check it out at

hdcinematics.com

With every transcode there is a loss in quality. This is why the fast import via Media Composer is a better solution (in theory) because it takes the MPEG-2 stream and simply de-multiplexes it into separate audio and video and rewraps the video (without transcoding it) into an MXF container.

HDCinematics may actually do the same thing, I'm not sure, but the result is an MXF with both audio and video and evidently MC can link to that which is great!

M2T files cannot be linked, but they can be fast imported. M2TS files can be directly linked.