CS4 just WON AVCHD editing!!

L

lirany

Active member
OK guys.
I have made some initial tests in premiere CS4 4.1 .
After trying out every OS (XP/vista/7) and every software (Vegas 8/9, edius, cs4 4.01) My prayers were answered!!

CS4 4.1 is editing smoothly All HMC150 material!
I can even edit directly from my SD card!!!!!

It will be remembered that Adobe was first to finally made it possible to edit AVCHD.

My system: Core 2 duo e6400, 4GB 667mhz memory, Nvidia 8500GT GPU, Win7 RC1 X64 .

(To edit 1080/25/30p material interpret footage as Progressive)
 
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Well... effects is a very different issue...
Premiere is not designed for real time effects therefore it's effects are not real-time oriented (like vegas).
As for your question any effect you'll add will definately require some sort of rendering (on my system of course) but even on DV I always render any effect I add.
 
At first glance, flawless is right.

This is the real deal.

I dragged the preview window to be a full 1280x720. Put some 720/24p footage on there and it played back in real time, just fine. Drag it into the timeline, and play it. But -- it was low quality. So I wanted to see how much of a performance hit I'd take by moving it to "best quality" -- and the answer is: NONE. Plays full-screen 720/24p at full frame rate and best quality.

So, for grins, I tried a new 720/60p project. And yep, it handles 720/60p AVCHD in full quality, in the original native codec, real-time.

And this is playing off a 2.4GHz dual-core laptop. I'm not rocking some quad-core i7 desktop with a fire-breathing graphics card here. This is a year-old laptop with an NVidia 140 graphics card.

Very, very, very promising!
 
1080/24p looks to be realtime as well. I'm viewing it on a 1920x1080 display so the system has to scale down to a 1280x720 preview window, but it certainly looks realtime. And I can tell it to do a pixel-to-pixel fit, so a 1280x720 window out of the 1920x1080 frame is playing back in realtime.
 
I've tested both 720/60p and 1080/24p with the new 4.1 update. I'm not getting "flawless" "best quality" playback -- but it is working -- meaning that at "draft quality" it does something that is essentially real time playback.

Below is a sample produced from "PH" 1080/24p "native" AVCHD files in Premiere Pro CS4.1:

LINK: http://vimeo.com/4906815

Since I've bad mouthed Adobe on this forum (and they deserve every bit of it) the least I can do is give them credit when they get something partially right.

Does PPCS4.1 beat Edius 5? No. Is this update a universe of improvement that comes close to something that could function in a studio production environment? Yes.

Before we start congratulating Adobe -- I have not yet tested how these AVCHD files are handled with Dynamic Link and After Effects. I'll run those tests later tonight or tomorrow.

But, yes, Adobe CS4.1 may now be considered an editor that handles "PH" AVCHD in what may be a functional workflow that does not require transcoding to an "intermediary codec."

I suspect that for consumer AVCHD cameras (6 to 18 mb/s) this update will rock. For the HMC150's "PH" AVCHD -- the good news is that it works.
 
As a side note -- there are three distinct "stutter" like things in that sample video. In all the transcoding I've done of all the HMC150 test footage I've produced -- there's never before been a "stutter" like thing -- like it's skipping a series of frames.

This may be an issue.
 
I've just finished editing some test footage that was gaining dust that I shot a while ago.
I'm having so much fun with it!
No need to transcode at all, everything is playing smoothly (only transitions, no magic bullet etc.).
I've used the new media encoder and speeds are much better now (I've had some issues with media encoder that wasn't encoding but that was solved with this: http://frankieloscavio.blogspot.com/2009/03/fixing-adobe-media-encoder-export.html)
Tested After effects with dynamic link and that seems to work as well, it's not fast (Dynamic link never was) but it seems to do just fine (no noticeable bugs). I think if I had more memory it could have worked much faster.

I'm sorry I'm writing all these "Over enthusiastic" messages but I'm just so excited, this changes everything for me. I was just ready to buy (as soon as 720p support was coming to premiere) a new Core i7 computer, and now I can take my time with that purchase.

Someone wrote here that edius is still the best editor, well… not for me! I tried Edius and Vegas and both of them never performed as good as premiere, I couldn't get realtime playback from both. (I also like premiere's Always-Render workflow, but that's just my personal taste).

Anyways premiere users enjoy this one, I hope vegas and edius will follow these footsteps…
 
Edius will not perform as well on slower PCs and no update to the software will change that. Reason being Edius doesn't do a "preview". PERIOD. Edius is true RT out. Now, if your system is not capable of real RT out then Edius will not perform as well as the other apps that offer a "preview". When CPUs catch up Edius will again outperform the competition BECAUSE it's not giving you a "preview". You will be able to color correct in true RT full raster out through HDMI.
 
Holy crap that looks so good. I've also did a test edit and exported straight from AVCHD in CS4 with the update, 720/24p, went so smooth. And without that intermediate transcode the picture quality is so much better (sharper and vibrant)!
 
Just upgraded to 4.1. Just rebuilt my box:

AMD Phenom 940 Quad // 4 Gig Gskill RAM // New Asus Mobo

Prem is importing from my card reader and playing ph 720 24p // 100% Highest Quality just fine... it's conforming some other files I imported and still playing flawlessly while hitting the CPU at around 40 to 50%. When conforming is done it lets me scrub around with the CPU around 60 to 70%...

Very nice. Adobe Media Encoder is pretty sweet as well... does some nice h264... a ton of presets for h264...

I understand Mac if you got the cash... but I was able to take my year-old DualCore PC and go Quad for under 400 ... and now with Encore/AE/Premiere/Photoshop integration ... so cool ...
 
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