Beginner to HD footage.

[ripper351]

Hello everyone, I just got my HMC150 last week and have taken alot of footage on the camera. I would like to now upload it onto my computer so i can edit it with AE and PP, and other programs in Adobe CS5. Where do i begin? I know I have to have a sdhc card reader? but to edit the footage must I convert the footage to another format (also, what is the format that the HMC150 films in, I know it is AVCHD but what is the name like ".mov" or ".wmv") I have heard of neoscene being used with an ac3 dilter, but will i lose quality in video. Please give me any information you have on getting the footage into an editing program, and exporting to youtube or other things. THis is very broad i know, but anything is appreciated.

[Phil1076]

Adobe has tons of information on AVCHD workflow...you can google it.

There's also a workflow thread here...please search.

[Mike Harvey]

Hello everyone, I just got my HMC150 last week and have taken alot of footage on the camera. I would like to now upload it onto my computer so i can edit it with AE and PP, and other programs in Adobe CS5. Where do i begin? I know I have to have a sdhc card reader? but to edit the footage must I convert the footage to another format (also, what is the format that the HMC150 films in, I know it is AVCHD but what is the name like ".mov" or ".wmv") I have heard of neoscene being used with an ac3 dilter, but will i lose quality in video. Please give me any information you have on getting the footage into an editing program, and exporting to youtube or other things. THis is very broad i know, but anything is appreciated.

So, not necessarily answered in order... the file extension is .mts. CS5 allows you to edit it natively, so no need to transcode it into another format unless you plan on doing heavy color grading (this would be were Cineform (Neo Scene) would shine).
To edit it, you must bring the *entire* "PRIVATE" folder off the card and onto the drive. In theory, you can get away with just bringing over the .mts files, but the "PRIVATE" folder contains a lot of other useful metadata like the timecode that CS5 will read.

You wouldn't really lose any quality converting to Neo Scene, but you wouldn't gain any quality either. The advantages would be if you wanted to do heavy color grading, the Cineform codec makes that a little easier to do. It's also less CPU intensive (though, I have a 4 year old Q6600 quad core that handles it fine). The downside is that it would take significantly more hard drive space.