AVCHD on Premiere CS5

G

Galleddrim

Active member
I remember a while back there was discovered an issue with the way Adobe handles AVCHD. Basically like crap. It showed up as chromatic errors in a green screen test that ended up being Premiere's problem. I believe that was CS4.

I can't find that particular thread right now, but probably someone will know what I'm referring to.

So is this issue fixed in CS5? Or do we need to keep transcoding to something like Cineform to get good color reproduction from AVCHD?
 
If you ask Adobe's PR department, everything is perfectly fine now. In fact they want you to use AVCHD all the way through using Dynamic Link, so After Effects supports it (but pretty choppy), Premiere can playback several layers of it, and so can Encore. So no, in theory no more transcoding required.

I'm only reserving judgment because I don't own it yet and can't say for sure. But unless it can achieve the fantastic framerates (forward and backward) of DVCProHD, I think I'll still transcode for large projects. Maybe on small quick turnaround projects the native format will be fine. Or maybe people who are way less picky than I am won't notice the performance difference.

You can download the trial version to see for yourself. Even though there are no AVCHD presets, just cancel out of the preset dialog, import your AVCHD footage and double-click. You can't add it to the timeline but you can scrub through it and try playing back at different resolutions.
 
From what I've seen CS5 handles native AVCHD much better than CS4 and Sony Vegas 9. Not realtime on my comp, but the best NLE playback for HMC150 footage I've seen yet.
 
I am not even talking about the editing speed, actually. More the reproduction quality in the color channels. Maybe someone who remembers Barry's DVCPRO to AVCHD green screen experiment in Adobe could weigh in? I have searched all over the forums and can't find the thread.
 
The issue was that CS4 didn't handle 24p 4:2:0 progressive chroma properly. I don't know if it's solved in CS5, as I don't have CS5 yet, but ordered it today so in a week or so I should be able to answer.
 
Barry_Green said:
The issue was that CS4 didn't handle 24p 4:2:0 progressive chroma properly. I don't know if it's solved in CS5, as I don't have CS5 yet, but ordered it today so in a week or so I should be able to answer.
Click to expand...

Good luck installing it Barry. CS5 has not been a very friendly install for a lot of us. I have been trying to install the Master Collection for 2 weeks now. Seems some computers (mostly win7 x64 machines) are popping up with a slew of errors.

Though Premiere is at least one of the programs that seems to have installed correctly. (Though I have uninstalled the complete package about a dozen times following adobe's suggestions for fixes on their forum).

Anyway.. I digress.. to answer the OP. PPro CS5 handles AVCHD quite well.
 
CS5 install onto Win7 64-bit was completely uneventful here - no problems at all and cohabits fine with CS3 and CS4.

> to answer the OP. PPro CS5 handles AVCHD quite well.

Are you actually answering the OP? He had a very specific question about whether the chroma decoding issues were now resolved. (There are actually several chroma issues - for example, the Adobe CS3/CS4 decoders make a hash of the chroma in Canon HF-series PF30 footage too).

Here's one earlier thread on the topic: http://www.dvxuser.com/V6/showthread.php?t=200584
 
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GrahamH said:
CS5 install onto Win7 64-bit was completely uneventful here - no problems at all and cohabits fine with CS3 and CS4.

> to answer the OP. PPro CS5 handles AVCHD quite well.

Are you actually answering the OP? He had a very specific question about whether the chroma decoding issues were now resolved. (There are actually several chroma issues - for example, the Adobe CS3/CS4 decoders make a hash of the chroma in Canon HF-series PF30 footage too).

Here's one earlier thread on the topic: http://www.dvxuser.com/V6/showthread.php?t=200584
Click to expand...

I am seeing no issues with chroma and AVCHD so yes, that would be answering his question, would it not? Did that bug only effect transcoding or did it effect avchd footage in general?

Glad your install went fine. Mine didn't and since the thread on adobe's website has over 14,000 views, I'm assuming many did not have your luck.
 
CS5 install went smoothly for me. Had an issue with my ATI video card compatibility (for anyone with an ATI, the 10.5 catalyst drivers don't play nice with Magic Bullet), switched over to an NVIDIA GTX 470, and now everything is running smoothly.

Will have to check out chroma . . . but I don't have a good way to compare 1 to 1 since I don't have CS4 and I don't have a green screen. If anyone else wants to do the test that would be great.
 
I pulled some PF24 AVCHD footage from a Canon HF10, and some 720P60 from a Panasonic HMC40, into CS5. Chroma bug appears to be present in both, unchanged from CS4.
 
Here's a comparison of the decode produced by CS5 versus Cineform's HDLink. This is 720P24 AVCHD footage from an HMC40, converted to CineformHD avi then framegrabbed using Virtualdub. Final image enlarged 2X using 'nearest neighbour' in Photoshop. This is a jpg; an uncompressed bmp is available here http://wildlifehealth.tennessee.edu/video/chroma.bmp (850KB).

chroma.jpg
 
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