AVCHD workflow: is it a PITA?

[Erik Naso]

I find no difference working with AVCHD or AVCintra compared to anything else I have used with Final Cut Pro 7 log and transfer to ProRes 422. Not sure about Premiere Pro or Avid.

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[Uli Plank]

AVCHD works very smooth under Premiere Pro CS 5.5.

Director of the Institute of Media Research (IMF) at Braunschweig University of Arts

[Randy Burleson]

Does anyone have any real world time estimates for transfer and conversion to ProRes 422 of an hours worth of high bit rate footage? I am thinking an Atomos Ninja or Samurai as an addition might save me a ton of time.

[Harry Pallenberg]

Never actually timed it, but faster than digitizing from tape! If I had to guess, I’d say I just did a 20minute clip in about 10 minutes?

Also in FCP 7 you can continue editing while the log & transfer is happening, so as soon as 1 clip is in you can start working while the others come in. That alone makes it fairly painless. Obviously you’ll suck up a lot more drive space…

I can;t wait for those new Panny cameras to come out.

Thanks,
Harry

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[Randy Burleson]

Yeah now, I am really considering the HPX 250 and a ATOMOS Samurai or Black Magic Hyperdeck Shuttle recorder. I think overall it’s going to be cheaper to buy hard drives than P2 cards, plus I can edit right away and not have to transfer or encode anything ( although I will transfer for safety) . The HPX 250 like the HPX 370 has 10 bit HD-SDI out.
I know it’s a shame not to use the AVC Intra 100 but 10 bit to PRO RES or Uncompressed QT in the case of the Hyperdeck Shuttle is still GREAT! I think that is going to make the most sense for us.

[Rafael Amador]

AVCHD, at least in FC, is a disgrace.
The need to convert AVCHD stuff to Prores just to make it editable, is inadmissible.
I’ve been editing native for 25 years and I will try to keep doing so.
I’m editing XDCAM in FC; if I was editing AVCHD I would go PP.
rafael

http://www.nagavideo.com

[Jeremy Cole]

I use ClipWrap to get the footage quickly into FCP. Works great. Log and Transfer works too, but takes longer. AVID does not appear to have an AMA connection to get AVCHD footage into it. Too bad, because I am sold on AMA. Works great for P2 and XDCAM.

Regards,
Jeremy

[Cg Coffyn]

We recently received our AG-AC160P and have been using FCP7 and testing FCPX and Premiere Pro CS5.5. I have done a few test edits with AVCHD only in FCPX and Premiere. I use J,K,L a lot to shuttle around and found the native AVCHD in FCPX to be very challenging, jerky…finally had it convert to prores proxy. That was pretty fast and worked generally well. Then I did the same in Premiere (native AVCHD) and found it much smoother except when trying to shuttle backwards quickly.

This was on a MacBook Pro, i7 with 4 gigs of memory and an external firewire 800 drive (7200 rpm, WD Caviar Black)

[Randy Burleson]

I just came across this after reading a review on Ken Stone’s website.
https://www.divergentmedia.com/clipwrap

it rewraps the mts files as QT movies and voila you’re good to go.

[Cg Coffyn]

We are not transcoding our AVCHD footage. We edit natively on both a MacBook Pro and MacPro. I was doing some transcoding to prores with Prelude initially and via FCPX when we were testing that software and decided it was one step we could easily pass on since we decided on CS6 Production bundle/Premiere for our editing.

We loaded up both computers with ram and have fast RAID drives via eSATA and that works really well. True that I can’t shuttle back and forth as fast as I can with ProRes, etc, but at least on the Adobe side it’s one less step. However, if we had chosen FCPX I might transcode to ProRes proxy since it is so easy to do and also relink back to the original files. My 2 cents worth anyway.