Best way to import MTS (AVCHD)/missing clips using Log and Transfer

Question

My footage (Sony HDR 500) of an average project consists of approximately 10 hours film and 1600 clips. When I use the option Log and Transfer to import in FCE not all clips are imported in FCE. All other clips are consecutively numbered and cannot be compared with the numbering of the clips on the camera anymore. As a result it is, with those large amounts of clips, almost impossible to find out which clips are missing.
Importing takes a very long time (is that normal?) so I would like to run this proces at night, but due to this missing clips problem I am afraid to do this so it is not a good option for me. Does anyone recognize this problem?
To avoid all this I now convert all clips with Voltaic to .mov before importing. At least I know for sure that I have all clips imported, but it is so cumbersome and it takes a lot of time too. This proces I do in steps because I am afraid to start everything at once. After converting the project almost takes 120 GB.
It takes days before everything is imported and that frustrates me. If the same material is imported in Edius for example it only takes an hour (tested) so it appears to be an FCE/Apple problem. Is there any way to accelerate?
I am working with an iMac from 2010, 2,8GHz quadcore i7, 16GB intern geheugen met snow leopard.
I hope someone can help me out.
Thanks, Jacqueline

Answer 1

While I have not seen the exact problem you describe, 1600 clips is a lot of clips to import at once - so is 10 hours of video.
If you are using FCE to Log & Transfer directly from the camera, your clips are automatically being transcoded to QuickTime/Apple Intermediate Codec(AIC) during importing, which explains the long time it takes to ingest the clips.
Also, QT/AIC files are much, much larger than the AVCHD clips in your camera.  If you are shooting 1920x1080 video, 10 hours of AVCHD translates into roughly 450GB of QT/AIC clips.  It is possible that you may be a) running out of disk space, or b) exceeding the scratch disk minimum allowable free space set in FCE > System Settings.  If so, that could explain why not all your clips are being imported - FCE is probably stopping the Log & Transfer process when it hits the disk space limit.
Regarding alternatives, I'm not so sure about Voltaic.  The Voltaic documentation says it only supports H.264 in QT/.mov files, and that would not be usable in FCE.  Check some of those clips to see what codec they are.  I suspect they are H.264.  (Also, you referred to the converted clips taking 120GB space, which just happens to match the AVCHD storage capacity of your camera ... and AVCHD is a form of H.264 video, so they take up about the same disk space.)
In order to edit your clips in FCE, they need to be QT/AIC.  Two alternatives come to mind - Clipwrap and MPEG Streamclip.  Both can convert AVCHD video to QT/AIC, and both support batch conversion.  If it were me, I'd consider Clipwrap first, for this volume of material, since Clipwrap was specifically designed for AVCHD.
The reason importing is so much faster in Edius is that it can import & directly edit AVCHD clips; Edius basically just copies the clips from the camera to your hard drive.  FCE has to convert the clips to QT/AIC first, before you can edit the video, and that takes considerable time.