AVCHD format and reviews

[Russell Lasson]

The new iMovie is suppose to be compatible with AVCHD. You might be able to use it as a way of converting it to another format that is FCP compatible.

Or you could digitize it in over HDMI using a mac tower and a blackmagic intensity card.

For basic everyday editing in HD, I’d suggest using DVCPROHD which ranges from 5.6MB/sec to about 15MB/sec.

-Russ

[Chris Tootell]

I recently bought a sony hdr cx7. I’m a professional stop motion animator for feature films and a film maker and I also own a JVC HD 101. The sony hdr cx7 totally blows me away, it’s an awesome little camera, tiny. Quality is good, in low light it helps to underexpose using the manual settings because the automatic setting bumps up the gain and it gets grainy. I use it with final cut studio 2 and final cut pro has no problems with the camera (with their recent update). You use log and transfer and it converts everything to apples pro res 422. when you bring up the log and transfer window with the camera connected, all your clips from the card are displayed (clips as in from when you hit record to when you stopped recording). Then you drag what you want into the transfer window and it starts converting, those pro res clips then appear in your project bin. The conversion process can take a little while, but I suppose it’s no longer than capturing realtime. I get just over an hour of HD footage at the highest quality setting (15 mbps) on an 8 gb pro duo card.