One really annoying thing about working with high definition video on the Windows platform is that none of the video editing application out there seem to understand that video clips from the camera may be split into multiple files because of the 2GB file size limitation of the FAT32 file system. In my case I’m working with a Canon XA10 recording to an SD card and editing using Adobe Premier.
At home I have a couple Macs with OS X and iMovie and Final Cut Pro X. All of the OS X programs have no issues with video clips that span multiple .MTS files, so it’s really annoying to me that none of the Windows apps know how to handle them.
A friend of mine came up with a really simple solution for us, which is a batch file that does a copy /b on the MTS files. We have this batch file sitting on the desktop and then simply select the MTS files we want to merge and it merges them into a single file. It makes things much easier, although of course it would be nice if it just worked like it does on a Mac.
Here is a slimmed down version of the batch file we use. Simply enter this code into notepad and save it as merge.cmd or something like that as long as it has a .cmd file extension. And then select the .MTS files from the camera’s SD card and drag them onto the merge.cmd script, and it will ask you to enter a path to save the merged file to, so enter that and hit enter, and it will do the magic. Have fun!
One quirky thing we discovered, when dragging the .mts files from the SD card, click on the first file from the set when dragging, otherwise the order could get messed up.
The batch file code
@echo off
title Merge Files.
set /p choice="Enter path to merge to: (eg. C:\video\test.MTS) "
if "%~1"=="" exit
if not "%~1"=="" SET one=%1
if not "%~2"=="" SET two= + %2
if not "%~3"=="" SET three= + %3
if not "%~4"=="" SET four= + %4
if not "%~5"=="" SET five= + %5
copy /b %one%%two%%three%%four%%five% "%choice%"
PAUSE