Archiving AVCHD
(based on using a Sony HD Camcorder with internal hard drive)
Using a USB cable, copy the .MTS files from /AVCHD/BDMV/STREAM. These files contain the actual video/audio with basic metadata. AVCHD format is already compressed, so unless you plan to edit the files the best way to keep them long term is to transfer the files to hard disk, keeping only the ones you want.
Personally, I prefer to view the video files with the PS3, which pulls them from MediaTomb. You may also want to rename the files and/or store them in a folder structure of the year, month, etc… To access this information, use exiftool. Here we can access the DateTimeOriginal key:
$ exiftool -s -time:all 00049.MTS FileModifyDate : 2008:08:10 19:12:34-07:00 DateTimeOriginal : 2008:08:10 19:12:24-07:00
Here is a bash loop to output a file of the original dates with filenames
`which ls` -1 *.MTS|while read file;do echo "${file}" `exiftool -s -time:all "${file}" | grep "DateTimeOriginal"`; done |sed -e 's/DateTimeOriginal //g' -e 's/[0-9:]*-.*//g' -e 's/:/-/g' > dates.txt