.MTS Files import with wrong durations

[DrewRothman]

I'm bringing in video shot on a Canon Vixia HF10. The files are each 11:20 long and are recognized as such when the properties are checked in Windows and when I open them in VLC or other players. However, when imported to Premiere's media browser they show up as being 47:33:15 each. This leads to a timeline claiming to be 6 hours long and various "disk full" errors when I try to export it. What can I do to force Premiere to recognize the correct length on these clips?

[Peru Bob]

Did you copy the entire contents of the SD card to your hard drive before importing into Premiere Pro?

[DrewRothman]

I have all of the visible files, yes.

I have the AVCHD, CVINFO, MY_MUSIC, and MY_PICT folders and their contents. The .MTS clips I imported are in the \\AVCHD\BDMV\STREAM folder.

These were provided to me on an external drive and I copied the whole structure to my local machine. I tried importing the clips straight from the external drive too but the same issue occurs.

I'm wondering if I should try to transcode all of these to some other format first or something so that Premiere sees the correct lenghts?

[Jeff Bugbee]

I've seen this issue where sometime in the past (even months ago) I imported footage with the same filenames. Somehow, Premiere associated old cache/render files with the new media, which resulted in the exact issue you are explaining: files show correct duration outside of Premiere, inside they are wrong.

I believe my solution was to delete my entire Media Cache folder. Note: I did NOT use the "clean up" button in the preferences, the entire folder needs to be deleted.

Location:

Mac: /Users//Library/Application Support/Adobe/Common

Windows: \Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Common

Exit premiere, delete media cache folder, restart Premiere, open project. See if that resolves the issue.

[DrewRothman]

Thanks for the tip, but that doesn't appear to have done the job. The lengths remain all wrong once it rebuilds the cache.

I tried importing another .MTS from the same external drive and that did the same thing. I pulled and old .MTS from my machine and that one did not exhibit the problem. So it seems like something specific to these files. I just don't know what.

I'm going to see if I can transcode one of these to MP4 with VLC, away from Adobe, and see what happens.

[Jeff Bugbee]

Can you upload a single file? The smallest that exhibits the issue would be ideal. We can at least see if the file does the same on my machine or if its a problem with your workstation.

[DrewRothman]

Sure! This file is 00:04:29 but in Premiere it shows up as 38:29:15

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1v6setva52Bnv4q7EUI82XipD59XLP1cL/view?usp=sharing

[Jeff Bugbee]

It's definitely an issue with your machine, not the files. Have you tried resetting the Premiere preferences holding Alt or Option launching Premiere?

[DrewRothman · Accepted solution]

Wiping the prefs didn't do it. Thank you for confirming that the files are ok though - that's a relief!!!

That said, what I have discovered is that going to the Media Browser rather than just using the media bin shows me a shorter list of files. Premiere seems to be recognizing and grouping the clips that were shot in a stream without stopping. Perhaps that's where the miscalculation is going wrong - it's assigning the duration of the entire sequence to each of the clips it contains. I'm going to toss the timeline and re-do from the Media Browser import and see if that does the job.

[DrewRothman]

False alarm. The Media Browser is simply not seeing all of the files in that folder.

[DrewRothman]

Yep. That turned out to be the key. The Media Browser is grouping the files, so it shows me two clips, but those contain all the others. I guess the way I imported them confused the program into applying the same length to all of the sub-clips when I should have just imported the two it showed me.