[James Souter]

oohhhh interesting. In your opinion what’s the best? I have experience with only vegas and FCP. I am only a learner editor so from that perspective FCP does help you along a bit, unfortunantly I have a PC so it’s vegas for me. Lucky there is some good support around for Vegas because you can’t make much magic out of the box without knowning what your doing

[James Souter]

Thanks for the reply!

The reverb/echo isn’t checked in vegas so it looks like I am out of luck. Next time I will need to use a real Mic!

[James Souter]

Thanks for all the help guys, it has been very helpful.

I actually use After Effects quite a lot and am just learning. Currently I am outputting to 1920×1080 Animation files (around 2 gig for 30 seconds) which also understandably brings the computer to a halt. I will start rendering two files from AE, a high quality final render and a low quality proxy.

Yeah I have actually started using the Vasst products, I accidentally purchased upshift instead of gearshift however! lol.

In anycayse – Gearshift is certainly a workable solution, but I am skeptical about the fact that my computer shouldn’t be able to handle AVCHD for the following reasons

1) My friend has a standard home Mac (can’t remember which one, but def less powerful than my PC) with final cut pro. They are pretty non technical users but when I asked them about working with the same camera they said they haven’t had any problems with the editing process at all and definitely no slowdown. I guess it’s possible that final cut makes proxies from the AVCHD files but I am not aware of this.

2) He used to have a PC and has a copy of Pinnacle Studio. I borrowed this and found that the AVCHD files playback with no slowdown at all, and the transitions are also smooth. It does appear however that the transitions are pre-rendered, still the AVCHD files playback without a hitch.

Tony – Our CPU’s are quite comparable really so it’s interesting you can confirm acceptable framerates. I am not looking for renderiffic framerates either, just workable. Are you using vista or XP? Your comments also seem to confirm that I should be able to work directly with the AVCHD files without the hassle of the conversion.