MC 5 - no Native AVCHD

Denwa

Well-known member
Finally checked out the new Avid MC 5. Haven;t played with it long bit first thing I did notice was no native support (though AMA) for AVCHD. You have to "import" it, which means a transcode.

Not that big a deal but still, would have been nice ot have some native support for AVCHD. I wonder if this will be added in an update or will it take AVID 6 years...


Don't know why, but installing onto a machine with two monitors left interface parts all over the place. Not the best defaults I tell yuh.


Anyone else been checking out MC 5? Haven't had time yet to really get into it.
 
There is AMA support for my canon 7D clips... no need to import them.

Right click into a bin, choose "link to AMA file(s)"...


But its not usable, playback is jerky, not smooth at all.
The same clips, plays fine on FCP and Premiere cs5.
 
Finally checked out the new Avid MC 5. Haven;t played with it long bit first thing I did notice was no native support (though AMA) for AVCHD. You have to "import" it, which means a transcode.

Now thats a shame! I thought MC 5's AMA would be able now to deal with native AVCHD ( that's what I remember AVID's marketing division claimed)... Well, at least we can transcode AVCHD now which alone is a major step in my opinion. Have you checked how much bigger the transcoded files become and what time it needs to transcode them (compared to "older ways" of transcoding)?
 
I imported a short clip and it gives you options as to what to transcode into like flavours of DNxHD and AVC-I, etc.

I used the default and the transcode was reasonably quick. This was a short clip however. I'll have to try it on a series of long clips.

Nice that it can handle the transcode internally but I was fully expecting to be able to edit AVCHD natively as PPro and EDius can do this now. Perhaps in an update?
 
Last edited:
There is AMA support for my canon 7D clips... no need to import them.

Right click into a bin, choose "link to AMA file(s)"...


But its not usable, playback is jerky, not smooth at all.
The same clips, plays fine on FCP and Premiere cs5.

What kind of machine do you have and what video card? Both 5D and RED play back in realtime on my laptop.
 
They play smoothly ? (let it play for some seconds, dont stop it for a while).

I test some files from my 7D on several machines, very powerfull... macbook pro with Nvidia 8600 and 4gb ram, imac 27" ,i5 , with ati 4870 and 8gb ram, pc hp xw8600 workstation 64bit, 8 gb ram + nvidia quadro fx4600
In all of them , the videos plays almost fine for a few seconds then stutters badly!

What laptop do you have, with what config ?
 
They play smoothly ? (let it play for some seconds, dont stop it for a while).

I test some files from my 7D on several machines, very powerfull... macbook pro with Nvidia 8600 and 4gb ram, imac 27" ,i5 , with ati 4870 and 8gb ram, pc hp xw8600 workstation 64bit, 8 gb ram + nvidia quadro fx4600
In all of them , the videos plays almost fine for a few seconds then stutters badly!

What laptop do you have, with what config ?

I don't have MC5 on the desktop yet, just the laptop. I'll be installing it on the real editing machine this week. However, on my laptop, in "Yellow" draft mode, I can play back 4k RED .R3d files without hesitation. I let it play for about 30 seconds. Worked fine. It stuttered in yellow/green mode and it was bad in green mode. To be fair, I am working off the mostly full internal HD and not an external.

The 7D files did NOT play as smoothly. In draft mode, it stuttered. I'd need to do more testing to see how bad the issue really is, and honestly, I can't think of a scenario where I'd want to cut via AMA on the laptop and need smooth playback. My laptop is also 2 years old now. It's a Dell Precision M6300 with a Quadro FX3600M. Does a really nice job, but an i7 with a similar video card should slaughter it.
 
I have , as i said, 27" imac i5 + 8gb ram , ati 4750 , what else do i need ?
In Adobe premiere cs5, the same files, plays very smoothly , even with some filters on them !!!
 
Lot's of people saying the same thing about avchd playback over on the avid forums.

What are they saying? AVCHD doesn't seem to be supported. At least not the stuff from the HMC150 that I have. Haven't tried anything from the Canon's yet.
 
What are they saying? AVCHD doesn't seem to be supported. At least not the stuff from the HMC150 that I have. Haven't tried anything from the Canon's yet.

You know, I might be confusing avchd with the Canon 7D footage, err. I'll go back and look but what I remember was stuttering playback problems, Avid said it's the hardware not the software but everyone else chimed in to tell them they have no playback probs with the other NLE software.
 
I tried linking AVCHD files through AMA. No dice. You need to "import" them, which means an internal transcode.
 
Back
Top