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AVCHD to HDV
Hi Everyone,
I read a lot about AVCHD vs HDV and trying to convert from one format to the other… and I’m a bit confused.
I have Canon EOS 550d and the output for HD is 1920×1080 in AVCHD (.mov file).
I’m editing with Premiere CS3.
I want to have a master copy in HD of my movie in the same resolution.I’m trying to convert my rushes to HDV which seems the best format to edit (the original file are lagging in the preview and the sound isn’t good).
What I don’t understand is in a lot of forums (and even on the adobe website) it is recommended to use a third party application (e.g.: cineform neoscene) to convert and then import in premiere.however I’ve tried to convert directly in premiere: starting a project in AVCHD 1080 (non anamorphic), importing my rushes and then export my rushes in HDTV 1080p (MPEG2) and adjusting the bitrate.
result: I’ve compared the files and the quality seems exactly the same (I can’t tell the difference) although the picture is slightly lighter for some reasons.Can anyone tell me if I’m doing something wrong here?
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4 Replies
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Hi Jerome,
What Cineform allows you to do is easily import and convert your footage to an intermediate format, and just as easily export using the ORIGINAL format.
No, HDV is definitely not the best intermediate format. Anything with a long GOP structure means that Premiere has to index the footage first to recreate full frames. A better alternative would probably be DVCPro HD.
Without a third party application such as Cineform, you will have to lay every single file in the timeline and convert them to a different format. This gets easier with CS4 /5 as you can drag these into the media encoder and convert them all at once.
Vince Becquiot
Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area -
Hi Vince and thanks for your answer.
It seems though that my process still work in terms of minimising the quality loss. If I understood correctly, using cineform allows to convert quickly all my rushes, but the quality will be the same as if I convert my rush from AVCHD to HDV in Premiere?
to tackle the problem of having to convert all my rushes one by one, I’ve actually put all of them in the timeline and export all the rushes into one file in HDV format.
I then reimport the HDV file (which includes all my rushes) into première and I edit this single file.I still don’t see the benefit of using Cineform: it seems that Premiere CS4/5 can do the same job… unless I missed something?
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Jerome,
The quality will definitely suffer in converting it to HDV. By intermediate format I mean that the file you are converting to is only for editing purposes. You would replace the footage with the original AVCHD footage at the time of your export.While in that case quality matters less, you want something that can edited natively and that doesn’t require much processing.
Cineform has the advantage of being near lossless, bringing the equivalent of Prores to Premiere.
Vince Becquiot
Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area -
Vince obviously knows what he is about. As we used the old Premiere Pro 1.5.1 which incorporates the Intermediate Cineform Avi format Ie., HDV , to convert AVCHD other camcorders, and H.264 mov files from a Canon 5D mark II @ 1920 x 1080i we use the old Premiere Elements 4 ( they talk to each other and there is no shift in clip quality ) which easily handles the mov. files and converts the timeline by Export to Movie and adjusting the clips by using the Adobe Media Encoder in-built to Microsoft avi, and noting uncompressed.
The file opens up as an avi file in PP and the quality and editing is first class. We will be going to CS5 soon with a new Xeon 64bit Quad Core Workstation wioth a Nvidia Quadro FX 3800, and will not use this convuluted way of processing the timeline , but, it works. Even to full HD quality on blu-ray.
Freelance Imaging & Video
AUSTRALIA
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