Modern AVCHD cams

[billyfromConsett]

I've heard about the problem of club members buying a new Canon, Sony or Panasonic AVCHD cam and then find that their reasonably modern PC or laptop just isn't upto the editing any of their HD footage.

Apart from using a file conversion app and transcoding everything to AVI, or buying an i7 rig with 4-8GB of ram, has anyone any ideas of a solution?

The only other thing I can think of is to use these camcorders' analogue connections to capture via an analogue capture card into a PC and edit in SD with AVI's.

Anything else to suggest?

[tom hardwick]

Billy, you've touched on a subject that must concern everyone who has bought a glittery new hi-def camcorder and after a few months suddenly finds the supplied chip (as most people seem to call the SDHC card) is full up.

I've never walked into Curry's to 'buy a camcorder' so that I can listen to the sales spiel, to see how much warning I'm given as to what I'm going to do with the 'full up chip' when that day comes. I seem to be supplying a constant service to my friends and (as the news spreads) their friends, in that I can quickly load the AVCHD footage onto Edius and with three mouse clicks have it pumping out DVDs. Blu-rays take longer.

So next Wednesday I plan to have a close look at all the supplied info and CDROMs that come with a new Panasonic HDC-TM700. I don't think buyers of such cameras will have analogue capture facilities on their emailing home pc, do you? They might have iMovie or Windows Movie maker or even Elements7 if they're keen, but actually capturing the footage and knowing what on earth to do with it must consign a lot of camcorders to the cupboard.

At least Panasonic let you plug the SD card into your TV and skip through each scene with the remote, but this editing on the run is hardly entertainment for others.

tom.

[billyfromConsett]

Well I bought a TM700 this summer and it's fantastic IMO. I haven't looked at the supplied CDrom mind. I don't need any analogue capture with my rig, but there are club members up and down the country equipped with Pinnacle DV500's and the like. I wonder if any modern analogue capture cards are presently available for those who don't.

[ned c]

My PC is pretty basic; dual 2.6GHz Intel and 2 GB of RAM; Windows XP. I don't have a problem editing AVCHD using Vegas Studio Platinum. I also have the Panasonic HD writer; it came with the Panasonic HDC-SD100 camera, an excellent utility for ingesting from the SDHC card plugged in to a $10 card reader. It will also create DVDs. The camera has HDMI out so it can be connected to a TV with HDMI in. The vast majority of users don't edit any way so for them a utility like HD Writer will do all they want; it does have a basic edit facility.

ned c

[col lamb]

Billy

What is the spec of your PC?

[billyfromConsett]

My rig I've had for about 7 months. It's an PC, i7 860 chip running at 3.4ghz, 8gb of Corsair ram, Asus P7P55D mobo, decent high performance air cooler, 3 x 1TB sata hard drives, GTX260 graphics (mercury engine active on CS5, seems to cope with basic transitions), Blu-ray writer inside a large coolermaster case.

It seems to work great.

[tom hardwick]

That's the thing see. I've simply no idea what goes on in that big black box of mine. I just went to DVC and said build me the machine I need, and they did.

[ADBest]

For our club Billy has highlighted a major issue.

As a member of quite a few years I have kept abreast of the technology - just, but I am now being asked to advise less keen members who have fallen into the AVCHD trap.

We need advice from the technically competent but it is not easy to describe the problem in language on which both the experts and the journeymen can find common ground.

Perhaps a current example will help.

We have a club member who has been capturing happily from his Digital 8 Sony cam to Studio 12, editing and burning DVDs for a number of years. His computer performed the job without complaint.

He has now 'been sold' a much better Sony - the HDR-CX115E. This sends H264 clips to his computer which Studio will accept but he then runs into the inevitable problems. What does he do? He doesn't wish to make high definition videos, he just wishes to be able to produce the quality he formerly achieved without having to buy either expensive hardware or software.

I am attempting to help within these constraints but there seams to be a plethora of software out there which will convert H264 to .avi but it ranges from free to £800. Am I on the right track and if so which software solution will realise our members ambition to achieve the quality he formerly achieved within a sensible budget?

Thanks for raising the issue Billy.

Arthur

[col lamb]

Billy

Just looked at the spec of your PC, have you ensured that CS5 is using your GPU to render and it is not in software mode?

For others wondering what is is about, CS5 only supports a limited list of graphics cards which provide the bulk of the playback rendering. There is a workaround solution to add other NVIDIA graphics cards

http://www.studio1productions.com/Artic ... ereCS5.htm

Details this workaround.

[billyfromConsett]

Yeah, I set the mercury playback engine both to work with my graphics card and to make use of it. But the graphics power that my GTX260 has is shown up when working with AVCHD files. I stabilised a shot in After Effects and linked it in the timeline - after which the timeline played less than smoothly.

So I put the timeline in software mode, rendered it and it played as it should. So I know that I might need a bit more power - maybe a GTX460 to fully exploit the rest of my rig. Should I pay £150 to save a minute or two of renders? I'd hardly call that value in all fairness, as I'm hoping to get a Zoom H2 or H4n sound recorder from Santa.

[tom hardwick]

Billy - read my review of the H2 here:

viewtopic.php?f=7&t=2709&start=15

[Geoff Addis]

Billy,

I can recommend the GTX460 graphics card as I have one fitted in my system that is based on an i7 350 (3GHz) CPU plus 12GB RAM. PPCS5 works well, almost as much real time performance as Edius on the same machine.

Geoff

[billyfromConsett]

Back to the AVCHD editing - I captured some files from my TM700 via the composite lead as AVI's and just edited them in standard def mode.

An old PC will easily do this - only an analogue capture card is needed. But you get a standard def movie.