AVCHD vs. XDCAM : workflow & quality comparison

[John Rofrano]

I don’t own either of these cameras but I do own an AVCHD camera and HDV camera (Sony HVR-Z1U) and I would not buy an AVCHD camera unless you are willing to purchase Cineform and work with intermediaries. AVCHD is an acquisition format that is horrible for editing. Also, the rendering times are astronomical. I’m talking 5x to render vs HDV. I don’t plan on buying another AVCHD camera.

Personally, I would buy the Sony EX1 without question. The workflow will be far superior. Also, as you pointed out the EX1 is in a totally different class (do you really think a $3K camera is going to be better than a $6K camera?). I realize that doesn’t answer your “quality” question but even if the quality was equal I’d buy the EX1 for the smoother workflow.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Bruce Hildebrand]

“unless you are willing to purchase Cineform and work with intermediaries”

Does this approach work well once the conversion is made?

I may be working with some consumer type footage in the near future and would like to know in advance how to handle the files.

Bruce Hildebrand
204 475-1618
gbhildebrand@shaw.ca

[John Rofrano]

Cineform works great in Vegas and you can get NeoScene for $99USD from Videoguys.com and it will batch convert the AVCHD files for you.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Rick Wise]

How about Gearshift for $50, or NewBlue AVCHD Upshift for $80?

Rick Wise
director of photography
San Francisco Bay Area
and part-time instructor lighting and camera
grad school, SF Academy of Art University/Film and Video
https://www.RickWiseDP.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/rwise
email: Rick@RickWiseDP.com

[John Rofrano]

How about Gearshift for $50, or NewBlue AVCHD Upshift for $80?

GearShift is a good alternative for people who want to edit with DV proxies. It would be appropriate for people who don’t have a computer powerful enough to edit Cineform. AVCHD UpShift is OK if you plan to stay in Vegas. If, however, you need to work with other applications like After Effects or particleIllusion, it is not the best solution because it converts AVCHD to HDV which is still not a good intermediary format for those applications.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Rick Wise]

Thanks! Very good to know.

Rick Wise
director of photography
San Francisco Bay Area
and part-time instructor lighting and camera
grad school, SF Academy of Art University/Film and Video
https://www.RickWiseDP.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/rwise
email: Rick@RickWiseDP.com

[Al Bergstein]

So as an owner of an HMC150, It does not have any better specs than the 1/2″ CMOS (which in some cases should be better, no doubt), better gain specs, and slightly higher shutter speeds. Sony VV 9.0c seemed to input my AVCHD with no problems, so not sure what your concern was.. did I miss something?

Let me ask a few questions that I would ask if I was upgrading…

What it does have is two SD card slots, which would be useful, but is that worth the price difference to you?
Is the viewfinder really better?
It seems to not have Genlock, that would be nice if I was upgrading. Why doesn’t it?
No timecode in or out. Does that matter?
Doesn’t really take me down below a rated 32 degrees. I would like to know that my ‘other’ camera could get me into really bad conditions under standard rating
No time lapse capability, I’d like that in a camera.
Is this 4:2:2 codec? (sorry, I probably should know this), but the specs I quickly looked up were uncler. If so, then I would probably compare a Panasonic DVCPro line of 4:2:2 based cameras rather than an HMC150.

But everyone loves my footage, so I don’t feel I need a “better camera” for my work.

Check out this footage as a thought. All shot on an HMC150. I’m quite happy with the quality, for half the price you are looking at spending. And this quality held up all the up to a 50″ screen, so I’m not feeling like it’s worth an extra $2000+

https://www.acousticsound.org for the small video. It’s in HD, so feel free to blow it up.

Hope this helps!

“Sony’s own statements on the subject are

Q. How does HDV and AVCHD picture quality compare?
A. The quality of AVCHD recording in the 9 Mbps (HD-HQ) mode is roughly equal to
HDV recording

(understanding that they’re talking about 25 megabits of MPEG-2 in HDV)

and

The MPEG-4/H.264 codec is a promising technology which is over two times more efficient than MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 codec technologies.

and even though Sony is the primary manufacturer of MPEG-2 based HDV equipment, they developed and promoted h.264-based AVCHD as:
the new HD digital video camera recorder format best suited for the HD era.

and, regarding the specific question of MPEG-2 vs. H.264, they indicated their future products will be going h.264 (including their own version of AVC-Intra!) with:

Sony B&P is developing a highly complex IC which will implement AVC Long & Intra GoP to be deployed in future products

So, apples to apples, h.264 spanks MPEG-2, and I think it’d be fairly impossible to find anyone who disagrees.”

Alf
Panasonic HMC-150 & FCP on MacPro Dual Quads, 12 GB 7.0.1 on 10.6.2

[Dave Haynie]

Cineform is a great alternative for some things.

If you’re doing complex editing, with many layers, it’s noticably faster, even on a fast machine. On my Q9550 PC, Cineform is as fast as DV was back in the earlier days of DV. But you do have to have a decent hard drive… you get about 60GB/hour from 1080/60i or 30p, 120GB/hour from 1080/60p. Add a few layers of that, and you can find yourself HDD-bound, rather than CPU-bound.

Of course, it’s an extra step. You can batch convert, of course. And you’re coming over from HDV acquisition, it’s still faster than realtime if you have a decent PC for the conversion. And no dropouts.

But particularly for editing it’s good. Unlike MPEG-2 or AVC, Cineform is intraframe compression only… no need to process N frames to give you the preview of the one you want. Cineform Neo converts your 4:2:0 AVC to 4:2:2, so if you’re doing processing on it, you may actually get better results. There’s technically a loss in quality going to any intermediate CODEC, but Cineform is using a wavelet compression technology, totally different approach than the DCTs using in MPEG-2 and AVC. So you don’t “stack” compression artifacts in a way they would reinforce each other (which can happen going from AVC to MPEG, which is what some people do).

About the only bad thing I can say about Cineform is that their anti-piracy technology is flawed. I had a huge headache with this in the fall, after my Win7 upgrade. Fortunately, the company is pretty responsive (which is why I’m still recommending the product).

-Dave