AVCHD Editing in Premier

T

turbojeffro

Member
I've just made the jump from FCP7 to Premier and am amazed by how easy it handles AVCHD and the amount of disk space it saves. Are there any disadvantages such as quality loss to editing in AVCHD over ProRes or other codecs?
 
Not really. The only down side may be longer render times each time you need to render out your project. Native editing actually keeps the original quality and only transcodes it when you are ready to render out your project. During the entire edit process you are still working with the native files so there is no quality loss at all. Converting to ProRes isn't magic and doesn't make already compressed footage look any better. In fact using that workflow forces multiple conversions.

The only downside I have found to native editing is that the render times can kill me. If I have a difficult client where I end up with 12 to 15 revisions of the edit it can take a long time to render out a Blu-ray and DVD versions. The advantage of ProRes here is that the raw footage was already converted so the render process can happen much faster each time.

Keep in mind that when CS5.5 plays your footage in the timeline or renders it is actually converting each frame on the fly to 32bit uncompressed so in essence it can look better then ProRes. The downside to this is you need a lot of ram and horse power to handle this on the fly conversion, effects rendering and so on. In terms of raw timeline scrubbing and cutting through footage I still find FCP7 and ProRes to be faster but the faster system you have the smaller the advantage will be.
 
If I have a difficult client where I end up with 12 to 15 revisions of the edit it can take a long time to render out a Blu-ray and DVD versions.
Click to expand...

Dont give your client DVDs for approvals. Use Wmvs or small qts.
 
On my i7 with cuda enabled and max render enabled export just flies.
Plus with max render you get the extra scaling for better IQ
 
DrDave said:
On my i7 with cuda enabled and max render enabled export just flies.
Plus with max render you get the extra scaling for better IQ
Click to expand...

except for those of us poor suckers on Mac who are stuck with AMD video cards and cannot use CUDA. I seriously considered selling my 17" MBP to buy a Lenovo 17" with a CUDA capable Quadro card but couldn't make the decision yet. Not sure if I am ready to switch back to a PC world just yet.
 
Thanks guys, this is pretty musch what I'm doing. I've got a nice editing rig so render times have never been an issue for me since I switched to Premier.
 
Wow. What a great little James-Bond suitcase you have built yourself! One question: that raid box you are using, the "Orico 3529rus3", is the fan pretty quiet? Have you tried eSata or are you sticking to USB 3 with that thing?

best regards, ninetto
 
Well quite is relative, still quieter than my workstation hehehe.

I stick to USB3 since it works fine, I have 3 ports on the laptop and is faster than anything the RAIDs can deliver, but yeah I tried eSata - no difference - as I said, the bus is not the bottle neck.

Frank
 
Just got a Samurai and it really has a lot of benefits.
It will probably become my standard capture device. Also solves - somehow magically - the judder problem while panning.
 
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