Final output 480x272 WMV - best workflow?

J

JimNastics

Active member
I'm in a bit of a pickle here! I have a couple of hours of raw footage shot at 720/50, which I've agreed to edit on location with a client... which means I need to do it on my laptop, which is not powerful enough for AVCHD editing. Considering the final output is just small wmv's for the web, I was thinking it would be a good idea for me to transcode down to 720x576 AVI and edit from there - my laptop edits DV AVI absolutely fine. Is this possible? Can anyone suggest any way I could do this?

Thanks in advance,
Tim
 
if your laptop and NLE aren't cut out to edit avchd, then you'll have to transcode to an avi format.....and that will take some time, especially on a slow laptop.

check out TMPGEnc Xpress ($100) or any of the other recommended video conversion apps mentioned in the these forums.

you might not be able to do SDE with your specs shooting avchd, but if you can take an hour break or so to transcode, you'll be fine (as long as you have enough hdd space!).
 
averan said:
if your laptop and NLE aren't cut out to edit avchd, then you'll have to transcode to an avi format.....and that will take some time, especially on a slow laptop.

check out TMPGEnc Xpress ($100) or any of the other recommended video conversion apps mentioned in the these forums.

you might not be able to do SDE with your specs shooting avchd, but if you can take an hour break or so to transcode, you'll be fine (as long as you have enough hdd space!).
Click to expand...

Thanks averan. I've been playing around with Panasonic transcoder and it can output DV AVI (720x576) as well as DVCPRO, which I didn't originally know! So this will do me fine. It is pretty slow, but at least I can edit the footage fine on my laptop. The only downside is I'm not massively impressed with the image quality of the DV AVI, maybe I'm just used to seeing the HD footage. What's the general consensus on the Panasonic transcoder?
 
i haven't even been able to get the panny transcoder to work....but in general, i've not been at all happy with DV avi. it always seems to take the glory and color of HD and turn it into an ugly grey mush.

my best results have always come from editing in HD and downconverting on the export.

i'd love to hear others' comments on how to get the most from DV downconverted from HD. it seems like you have to do a lot of color correction to bring back the luster and sharpness of the original footage.

one other thing about downconverting, make sure, if you can, that its creating square pixels. otherwise you're unnecessarily losing even more quality stretching them into 16x9.

you might do a few tests converting to HD avi, maybe 720p. you might get lucky with your system and be able to handle it fine. i'm always impressed by how much easier low-compression avi handles compared to raw avchd or other more compressed formats.

best of luck!
 
Sorry to bump my old thread, but it's a related question!

I have about 8 hours shot at 720/50p which I need to edit on location on my laptop. This time, I am planning to do proper proxy editing - I will edit the proxies on my laptop with the client, then open the project file on my editing machine back home and do the swith back to the source files. then render. The problem I'm foreseeing here is that the source is at 50fps, but I usually edit DV AVI proxies at 25fps. Will this cause big problems if I edit 25fps proxy files for 50fps m2ts source files?
 
i can't speak from experience on your exact scenario, but i haven't had any trouble dropping 60p clips into 30p projects.

most NLEs will do their best to handle the 50p stuff like its 25p. you most likely won't notice anything at all.
 
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