Best format to render AVCHD from GH2 when using Sony Vegas or similar program?

[gundar]

What do you find the best format to be when you shoot in 1080i?

I am currently converting to "8mbps" but I still see some interlacing problems when playing in VLC media player... Better on Windows Media Player but since these are WMV's, that's almost a given.

Any tricks or formats that work best?

[jbcon]

I'm curious about this as well. I downloaded a trial of iOrg's AVCHD Video Converter and outputed my raw 24H footage (manual movie setting @1080/24p) to both .mov and .mp4 and while the motion is far less jittery and the footage looks smooth, even at the 12kmb/s setting I fear I am loosing some of the quality from the original footage. The iorg product only offers am 8mb/s and 12mb/sec output setting. If recording at higher bitrates is there a correlation here or are these two different things?

I'm using Vegas Pro 11 and want the best quality footage I can get to use as a starting point. What format is best?

As far as iorg's product, it seems pretty good and simple and does batch converting but would take forever if you had a ton of footage. Took me about 1min and a half for a single 20 sec. click that was recorded with 72mb/s Driftwood hack...

[David W. Jones]

Probably doesn't help since I'm on a Mac, but I convert my footage before editing with 5DtoRGB Batch into ProRes 422 files.
You might try something like DNxHD on the PC.

Good Luck!

Dave

[j1clark@ucsd.edu]

What do you find the best format to be when you shoot in 1080i?

I am currently converting to "8mbps" but I still see some interlacing problems when playing in VLC media player... Better on Windows Media Player but since these are WMV's, that's almost a given.

Any tricks or formats that work best?

From your title to your description... it is not clear to me what you are talking about...

If you shoot in 1080i, then you will get interlace lines when displayed on a 'progressive' display, most often visible when something is moving. This especially true if one does not get the odd/even field first set up correctly. The 'best format' for computer display, and these days everything is a 'computer display' essentially, is to shoot progressive. The question then becomes whether to shoot in 24p, 25p, 30p, 50p, or 60p... some of those options are not available... the most popular would be 24p, 25p, 30p...

Recently I looked into what bitrates Youtube recommended, and it seems that 8Mbits/s is it for 1080p material. Now, for standard broadcast HD, that runs at about 20Mbits/s, so at 8, one will have 'less'. But that may be acceptable for a youtube clip. Personally I think that 1080<anything> is overkill for youtube...

What may also be happening is that at 1080 the processor you are using to display the video, may be running out of 'gas', and so, the actual frame rate may be less than the 30 fps that your media is listed at, and so every so often there's a frame hesitation, and occasionally the scanlines are visible.

[Bruce Foreman]

I use Avid Pinnacle Studio 15 on a Core i7 2600 base PC. It likes to use a 60i timeline but 30p clips from a Canon HF100 (in a 60i stream), 30p clips from Canon EOS DSLRs (native progressive), and since I acquired GH2's the HBR 30p (also in a 60i stream) clips all edit fine. I use the "preset" output options, I've used rendering to AVCHD on standard DVD disks (these seem to play fine on Blu-ray players and should on PS3s but there is about a 22 minute time limit to what will fit on the disk.), and authoring to standard DVD is pretty simple and straightforward.

I can also render out to several WMV formats one of which is 1280x720 at 60p and this plays beatifully both on computer and on my big screen TV. Another set of "presets" is MP4 ranging from small frame sizes to a 1920x1080p that plays very nicely on the TV.

No interlacing artifacts on anything unless I try to "monkey" with it.

This is not a real popular editing package, many "run it down", but I never have to "jump through the hoops" I read about and it seems to have a very flexible feature set.

[jbcon]

I know there are tons of post on how to do this on a Mac, as well as even a few tricks to fake it in older versions of Vegas. But I'd like to know a couple of things... did Vegas Pro 11 fix this and now allow for pull-down from within, or is it still a problem. Also, what does this really look like?

The reason I ask the later, is when shooting footage in 24H on my GH2 I am seeing jerkiness and unnatural motion artifacts when panning and when anything moves in the scene. I have converted my footage from the native .mts, to both .avi and .mov and still am seeing the same thing, regardless of what program I play the file or format I render a project using this footage in Vegas. Although in the scenes I process in Vegas it isn't as bad. I have used the before mention, Vegas Fake method, and can't really see a decernable difference in the before and after, other than quality degredation.

Coming from a GH1 with 24p hack, I have never experienced this before. Or, at leats never noticed it... Is the pull-down issue worse on the Gh2? Or is this something different all together.

Is there any benefit in Vegas Pro 11 to having footage in original .mts, vs. .avi, and.or .mov?