AVCHD in Post

[Noah Kadner]

Is it really that important- AVCHD is optimized as a camera format not an editing format. Once it’s shot you really don’t want to edit native because of all the extra processing required to rip and re-encode it on the fly because it’s an intraframe, long-gop codec. .

Transcoding to ProRes in FCP gives you much better quality, playback performance and holds up much better in post to filters, effects, transitions etc.
The transfer from AVCHD to ProRes in FCP is really fast too- not much more so than simply copying over. And then you’re all set.

Anyways- to answer your question Premiere is about it for native.

Noah

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[Greg Curda]

Thanks Noah…

I agree with your position, but was asked to find a native solution. I appreciate your help and have passed your views on. I hope I can help you with an audio problem sometime!!

G

[Greg Curda]

Hi Noah,

Thanks for that post!! It was just the language we needed to discourage the native editing concept since we are all FCP…

Greg

[Al Bergstein]

Since I was searching around for something else, I thought I would update this post for people who find it in the future. I’ve been editing AVCHD natively now in Sony Video Vegas 10, and it appears that they have very effectively dealt with the preview stuttering issues, etc. I do a lot of fast and dirty editing there, since it saves me time (=$) in post production costs.

I agree with Noah, that for more higher quality jobs, requiring effects, and deep multiple tracks, I transcode, either via Neoscene on Windows or I use FCP to take it to ProRes on Apple.

So the choices have expanded since this original post.

Alf