RT Editing of Native AVCHD - Who Is Doing It?

David Saraceno

David Saraceno

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With what on what platform and with what NLE?

I was greatly disappointed by Premiere CS4 Mac on a MacPro and a MBP.

No RT whatsoever.

This wasn't the HMC150, but a Canon with MTS footage.

Is everyone transcoding or something else?
 
Transcoding. I think most people (especially Mac people) are. I'm impressed by how well and speedily ProRes edits, even at mixed frame rates and sizes!
 
I'm going to transcode for a while.

Wouldn't mind working with native AVCHD files but I think I'll need some type of super quad 4 laptop to do that and that's not in the cards [credit cards] at this time.
 
At first I was trying VASST's gearshift, because I'm a vegas user, but now I transcode and use Raylight... I like the result. I also transcode to ProRes for FCP on the mac because my mac is a little older and I primarily edit audio on it... native is not in the cards right now (as hidef1080 said).
 
I use Edius with a Quad Core and I can not get any realtime performance, but I could still edit and render.

Converting to Canopus HQ is quick and easy.
 
The rumor is that FCP will facilitate RT editing of native AVCHD footage in its next release.

Actually not a rumor, but announced at IBC earlier this year.

Question become what horsepower is necessary to achieve that functionality.
 
David - do you have a reference for that Final Cut announcement? I recall seeing it reported too, but can't find the source. I wanted to check exactly what was said - there was mention of supporting Panasonic's metadata, but as far as editing codecs go I'm not sure if it was 'full support' or 'native editing' or some other thing that was promised.

It also wasn't clear whether they were talking about a point release (eg. Final Cut 6.0.5), or a future release of Final Cut Studio (ie. FCS 3). Personally, I'm hoping for 'both,' since I don't expect FCS3 to appear until Snow Leopard hits, next Summer.
 
whats wrong with Premiere CS4 Mac? I have read they edit native AVCHD everywhere... Am I wrong? Does everything need to be rendered?
 
Well we all know already that Premiere CS4 won't edit AVCHD in realtime pretty much no matter what your setup is (Premiere decoder issue), so I am going to run some tests tonight with Pinnacle Studio Ultimate on the same computer I have CS4 running on and see if there are any significant differences. My money's on Pinnacle, just a hunch though. I'll report back my findings.
 
Yeah you had mentioned that, which boggles my mind. I am not sure what they had done to their editing platform, or software to prepare it to do so, but it's certainly not something that any of us have been able to recreate.

I am still willing to bet it has something to do with the complexity of the editing software and Adobe's decoder that is restricting so many users from realtime playback and editing.

It's also unfortunate that Adobe hasn't released any updates to CS4 that include editing presets for AVCHD footage shot in 720p.
 
If you don't mind mentioning what you are using for hardware I would be interested in looking further into it. Also, I like many others, have had no success in creating a custom editing preset. The option to choose 720p is not available within the custom preset window. The version of Premiere CS4 I am using is 4.0.0.
 
Intel Quad Q9450; 4 GB OCZ Platinum DDR3 RAM; Nvidia 9800GTX 512MB GPU, ASUS P5E3 mobo.

About the preset -- interesting -- you could customize it in the beta version, but not the production version. I take that back.
 
Sweet system! I have a P5Q Pro MoBo, Q6600 OC'd to 3GHz and 4GB of DDR2 RAM, but a much older graphics cards. In fact, it's the only think I haven't upgraded in a few years. It's an nVidia Quadro FX1400 with 128 mb of ram. After having done a little research, I have discovered that unlike Vegas and other NLE's, Premiere DOES use the GPU, and keeping on the topic of AVCHD and H.264, the video card can be used for the decoding of that codec.

I am beginning to think that if I upgrade my video card to something like an 8xxx and 9xxx series nVidia card, or HD3xxx and HD4xxx series ATi with native H.264 acceleration, that would certainly help. Maybe I'll just splurge and buy the nVidia Quadro CX!

Thanks for sharing your specs!
 
Barry_Green said:
I saw CS4 editing HMC150 1080/24p footage in realtime...
Click to expand...

Right.

And I saw Bigfoot in North Idaho last weekend. :)

I believe you Barry, but what hardware set up facilitated this?

Because I can't get CS4 to do anything without crashes on a QuadCore Mac with a RAIDed 720.11 Seagate system and the 512 MB ATi 3870.
 
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