AVCHD Editing comes to Vegas 7.0e

[Brent Dolan]

Has anyone tried it? I know May 1st was only a few days ago but it is pretty exciting news seeing I really think this new format of AVChd will save a lot of people from throwing away the old dual p4 procesors with 2 gigs of ram NLE systems.

I been holding off on the HDV/mpeg 2 editing because I just think it is another Digital 8 solution to a problem.

I really hope AVCHD is the answer. I have seen the way that mpeg4/ H.234 looks online through a quicktime 7 pro encoding from just DV. The file size is so small too. Might even make Laptop Editing a Screamer. To bad Vegas only is supporting sony cameras now. I really like that new 3 chip Panasonic one with the built in 5.1 surround sound. Very cool.

I am itching to hear feed back. I normally edit in premiere 2.0 but I did edit my resume on Vegas 6. It was very easy to learn but yet again it is a timeline editor as long as it has the codecs we need to edit. It is a winner in my book.

[Adam Rose esq.]

have read one report, which came back that was VERY poor fps on the timeline. Seems one has to use intermediates, eg Cineform.

the quality is all there etc, but currently too much grunt to edit with. time will tell, eh?

[Terje A. bergesen]

Sorry to stuff flies into your ointment, but H.264 is very CPU intensive for editing. Don’t expect to edit it on a low-end PC. Just playing H.264, that is playing it in a media player, in reality requires a fast dual-core CPU.

Going by that, I can’t imagine editing H.264 HD without intermediate files will be painful on anything but a fast quad CPU box with tons of RAM.

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Terje A. Bergesen : https://terje.bergesen.info/

[Brent Dolan]

That is dissapointing to hear. I don’t know why companies do stuff like that. It is like selling a car with out wheels and they expect you to drive it off the lot.

Has anyone used the cineform codecs in vegas or premiere 2.0? I looked at and it seems like a good way to keep the old computers running on next gen video.

I still shoot in SD and editing in SD is a dream come true. It looks like with any sort of HD it is 1997 all over again. I have seen some HDV footage from consumer cameras and just blown away how great and better the quality is. And they didn’t even light it like film or anything.

I want to make the leap and believe AVCHD is the way to go seeing I heard about the HDV drop frame issue all the time but you can fix that by buying master quality mini dv tapes that cost way to much and then breaks the budget. It just reminds me of Hi8 and Digital8. hence 1997 all over again.

[Terje A. bergesen]

[whatexitvideo] ”
I want to make the leap and believe AVCHD is the way to go seeing I heard about the HDV drop frame issue all the time but you can fix that by buying master quality mini dv tapes that cost way to much and then breaks the budget”

I don’t know where you have “heard” this, but in general I think it is a little bit of BS. There is no extra demand on tapes when dong HDV compared to doing DV, the bitrate is the same, and the tape doesn’t know that you are putting HDV on it rather than DV. Buying good quality tapes is always a good idea, but whether you put a DV, HDV or AVCHD bitstream on that tape doesn’t matter.

If you want to do consumer HD right now, I think the consensus is that the best camcorder out there is the Canon HV-20, which is HDV. It is relatively inexpensive, HDV is straightforward to edit compared to AVCHD, and no, you don’t really need any “special” tapes to make it happen.

I think that AVCHD camcorders will eventually surpass the quality of HDV, but currently they stay at relatively low bitrates (15M/s or so for Panasonic for example) and the encoding chips apparently are not entirely there yet, so HDV is the better option.

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Terje A. Bergesen : https://terje.bergesen.info/

[Brent Dolan]

Thanks for the advice. I was looking into the HV-10 canon because it can be used as a deck for my old dv tapes as well. So one of those was in my budget and the price of it is so nice for such a conspicuous handheld camcorder. I like that Panasonic HDC-SD1 AVCHD 3ccd camera too and was thinking of getting a black magic hdmi card to capture in footage shot from the panasonic.

I like to shoot 3 camera set ups for events I do so it will be good to have these as my back up cameras and eventually I will be going with a sony v1, canon xh a1, or panasonic hvx200.

I am leaning more towards the canon a1 for now seeing it seems to have the best bang for the buck and I shoot a lot of surfing footage and need the good 20x optical lense even though the Sony V1 has a 20x optical lense too but heard/read it doesn’t work as good with fast panning motion (mostly up and down) like the canon a1 does.

The thought of AVCHD makes me happy to see the advancement in video but you are probably right it is to early to get excited.

Thanks
Brent
brentdolanmedia.com
eastcoastsurfer.com

[Terje A. bergesen]

[whatexitvideo] “The thought of AVCHD makes me happy to see the advancement in video but you are probably right it is to early to get excited”

It is a little too early. The latest comparisons I have seen, the HDV camcorders have significant better quality than their AVCHD counterparts. Motion artifacts etc seems to be an issue. This is comparing the consumer/prosumer models, the HV-20, SD1 from Panasonic and the Sony camcorders.

As for editing, this will always be a lot harder to do with AVCHD than HDV, simply due to the fact that AVCHD is compressed a lot more, and with an algorithm that makes decompression a lot harder for the CPU than is HDV.

—
Terje A. Bergesen : https://terje.bergesen.info/