AC160 ac160 avchd file

Lindquist

Lindquist

Veteran
i have a mbp 2011 2.3c2d ,4gb ram(upgrading to 8gb soon)

will that be fine to edit with?
will it be quick on fcp and premiere, afx ect?
 
I use a early 2008 2.4 macbook pro to edit on with FCPX, Adobe Cs5, and I found if I use Prores I can get by with most editing. I seem to have some issues using after effects sluggish. But other then that I get by.
 
One question for the editors out there. I read that you can capture from your camera through a blackmagic or Matrox in a non Avchd file and straight from the camera sensor without the added compression. If this is true, what then is recorded to your SCHD cards after shooting on your camera. When reading about the capture hardware, it did not sound like you have to be plugged in while shooting. It sounded as if you have already shot the material and were plugging in your camera to their hardware and can capture into another format.

Does this sound correct?
 
The video output can be connected to the capture card input. Example HD-SDI on each end.
what is recorded to your camera's SD card is avchd.
I would never plug my camera into a capture card and play out and capture on the other end.
Sounds like you worry too much about quality of footage you edit with. I find the problem is transcoding it down to SD-DVD or for youtube and maintain the quality you expect.
 
i just done want to get the ac160 and have it be slow on my mbp, also i want to see alot more low light tests, and autofocus tests
 
ELN614, That is exactly what I want. A great quality sd-dvd from hd footage. Do you know the quality of the hd to sd conversion of the blackmagic or matrox boxes? say 1080p footage on a timeline converted to Sd to transcode to Dvd and maintain quality?
 
Dstar - The Blackmagic or Matrox products don't add any quality or processing when down converting, some of the Matrox cards have hardware that helps with the speed of creating h.264 files, but the quality is no better than what you'd get on a Mac running Compressor. While editing, they cards provide an extra output to connect a video monitor or VTR for proper broadcast signals.

The only time that capturing to another device makes sense is if you're shooting green screen, you can get more colour information by recording directly to a computer via SDI or HDMI and appropriate capture hardware. For everything else, AVCHD converted to ProRes looks amazing and edits smoothly on most Macs.

You can never maintain all the quality of HD when down converting to SD as you're throwing way 75% of your pixels when you down-convert

Cheers

John
 
Keep in mind that FCP cannot natively edit AVCHD files like Premiere can. So you will have the extra required time and disk space needed to first convert the files in your workflow.
 
I have not had an issue with Panasonic's AVCHD plugin. My mac recognizes the files and I edit away on FCPX.
 
What are you shooting? The Panasonic plugin DOES NOT WORK FOR LONGFORM video... it does not cleanly stitch spanned clips together.

As for capturing via HDMI or HD-SDI... if you do this WHILE SHOOTING, you can get uncompressed (or less-compressed) footage that's better than the AVCHD compressed footage, with a better colorspace. But if you do this after shooting, you're just playing back the already-AVCHD-compressed footage through the camera... you won't see any improvement over AVCHD, and you'll spend a lot more time and effort.

If you're going for the best quality DVDs, it's still beneficial to edit in HD, then feed the MPEG compressor the HD "master".
 
I have tried feeding the HD timeline to Compressor and you get shoddy looking Dvd footage. I am trying the new workflow of taking the timeline from FCP as a self contained movie and using Streamclip to down convert to a SD clip with AVCHD files. So far still testing, but the footage on the TV played back on a standard Dvd looks good. Just have to refine my workflow with these two programs.
 
I usually export self-contained from FCP, then send the output file to compressor, and get great results. I guess I should mention I always use a progressive timeline, and a progressive output file... I think in the distant past I had issues with field dominance in interlaced files when going to DVD. What are your timeline setings?
 
Well, I guess I should try that with my new camera. When having issues, I had the camera that shot 1080/60i. I am now shooting progressive 720/60p timeline and converting that to Dvd for regular stage programs. I will try converting both ways with the progressive timeline and check the differences in going right to compressor, or using stream clip for the downconversion before going to compressor. I have been using Media encoder instead of compressor for rendering to Mpeg. I seem to get better results.

But, so far with the Avchd files to Prores, much better then HDV to prores when pertaining to final mpeg on SD Dvd.
 
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