HDV native vs AIC transcoding

[Ryan Mast]

I used AIC quite a bit last year while I was still using Final Cut Express, which only allowed for HD capture to AIC, not HDV or ProRes. I didn’t notice a significant quality loss.

The quality difference you’re seeing is most likely the loss in compressing to H.264. Can you export it as a QuickTime Movie in AIC?

[Smitty Miler]

H.264 is the Quicktime movie compression…. right? What would be the best setting to use if you wanted to play a video back on a Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro for presenting on a 720p projector?

—- UPDATE —-

Ok, not sure what is going on. I switched my MacBook from mirroring to dual display. Only the resolutions with (interlaced) next to them would output a signal. The highest resolution available was 1440 x 900i which with the video off, the desktop windows/menus didn’t look great — readable but not crisp.

SO, I took the HDV video I imported to iMovie and exported it BACK to the camera. That takes the MacBook out of the equation. I played the “edited video” back through the camera to the projector and it looked MUCH better than the MacBook output… can’t say if how different it looked from the original source. So I guess that would be HDV > AIC > back to HDV?

That said, perhaps HDV to AIC isn’t loosing that much?

I’m wondering how an AppleTV (540/30fps @ 5Mbps max ) or Mac Mini (probably limited to 720/30fps) would look.

[Gino Kalkanoglu]

AVCHD cameras shoot 24Mbps at the most which is 3MB or so roughly. So you have 3MB of information and putting it our on ProRes to 25MB does not change the 3MB information size. You will have 22MB of empty data if you do that. Best thing to do is to edit the footage on AIC timeline and put it out as either AIC or HDV1080i60 deinterlace it and here you go. Before you export it out you can also use filter settings in the export menu on FCP 6.0.3. Thats what I use. I hope this helps. Deinterlace the footage though. Also get the magic bullets. You will be amazed once you play with it. Learn the basic color correction. You will see ton of difference on your footage.