Exporting AVCHD from SD card for storage

[custerc]

Hi all...please forgive the super noob question, I have ordered Barry's book but I live in China so it may be a while before i get it. So, in the interim...we're going to be shooting a lot of footage via our HMC and 60d (both use SD cards), so I bought a SD card reader to use for importing the footage.

We will be using premiere pro, ultimately, for editing, but I don't necessarily want to both importing into that at this point, I just want to pull the footage off of the SD cards and store it on the hard drive in the same format it's in on the card. Can I just copy/paste the "PRIVATE" folder (or the AVCHD folder inside it), rename the folder with logging info, and store the files that way? I assume that would work, but I don't know if it's the easiest/best/most lossless way to do it.

Also, just to test, I shot some footage with the HMC, pulled it into premiere, and hit "render all in work area" so the preview would run smoothly. It doesn't look very sharp, though; whenever I zoomed in at all there was a lot of pixellation. Even when I exported a still, it was pretty small (attached below, pixel aspect ratio is off but I wanted to upload exactly what premiere exported. Is that just a factor of Premiere pro not having done the "final" rendering or whatever yet, or do I need to be tweaking settings in the camera?

Again, forgive the noob questions, I just got the camera, switched to premiere pro, and barrys book hasn't arrived yet. Previous to this I was using a DVX, so the totally digital workflow and storage thing is new to me. Thanks!

 

[Exact]

You can copy the "private" folder to it's own folder on your hard disk and you should be good to go.

It's very easy to be super critical of footage when you are only a short distance from your monitor. Stand back to normal TV (or cinema) viewing distance and things often look much better. Have you ever stood that close to a TV? The noise is horrible!

 

[custerc]

You can copy the "private" folder to it's own folder on your hard disk and you should be good to go.

It's very easy to be super critical of footage when you are only a short distance from your monitor. Stand back to normal TV (or cinema) viewing distance and things often look much better. Have you ever stood that close to a TV? The noise is horrible!

True...it just looked like the total resolution, i.e. the size of the video wasn't big enough to be HD...anyway, if you've got an HMC and a 7D, do you find their video to be similar? obviously the 7d has a bigger chip, but in terms of quality, matchable? I watched the HMC footage and felt like it was small and grainy, then watched 60 footage shot in the same place at the same time, and it just looked MUCH better. But of course the codec is different and I don't know the first thing about AVCHD footage, I just connected the card and opened up premiere to check it out...

 

[Phil1076]

I just create a directory called, for example, SD1 or SD2 and, as mentioned above, copy the PRIVATE folder under it. It preserves the AVCHD file structure.

 

[Exact]

.... if you've got an HMC and a 7D, do you find their video to be similar? obviously the 7d has a bigger chip, but in terms of quality, matchable?

Yes it's matchable with a little work. The wedding I am currently editing had a combination of a 7D and an HMC at the back. I used the neutral scene file on the 7D with saturation, sharpness and contrast turned down. Because I was unable to get a perfect white balance match on the day I had a little playing around to get them to match in post but it's done. If you were watching the video rather than looking for technical quality differences between scenes you would not notice.