Quick SDE's with HMC on the road?

MattRobertson

MattRobertson

Well-known member
So i'm most likely going to be touring with a group that i'm good friends with, and we were wanting to do some same day video blog quick edits with hmc footage. I do not have a laptop, but one of the members of the group has just your regular not so spectacular laptops that he's taking with us. Is there a way to quickly edit this footage on there with the least hassle possible? If its nessecary to convert the footage to SD, i'm fine with that, we just wanna be able to keep people updated during the tour. Also, I have a canon hv20 that i'll be taking with me, and on that there is a SD Lock where it allows you to capture the hd stuff as SD straight out of the camera. Would we be able to, say, download a trial of sony vegas and just use it for the trip (it'll only be a little more than a week).

Thanks
 
I'm in a similar boat to you Matt, in that I need to edit HMC151 footage on a fairly standard laptop (Core2Duo 1.8ghz with 4gb RAM), and I only need to output videos to upload to a site. It chokes on AVCHD natively, so I have recently been testing various options.

Transcode to an intermediate HD format - I'm no expert on this, but I think the reason AVCHD is such a killer to edit natively is due to the extreme compression it uses. A lot of people transcode to formats like CineForm which keep the quality but are far less compressed so less CPU-intensive to edit. The downside is that it takes a long time to transcode, and you end up with massive files... far too big for the environment I work in. This may be fine for you though, so have a search around here for that option.

Transcode to DV AVI - you can use the Panasonic MainConcept transcoder from here. Initially it was only for AVCHD to P2 DVCPRO HD transcoding, but in the last release they added AVCHD to DV AVI support. It works perfectly well, it's a hell of a lot quicker than I expected, and you end up with simple DV AVI files which are a breeze to edit. The downside is that the quality really is poor, suprisingly poor in fact. You need to give it a go to see what you think, I personally was disappoitned with the IQ enough to look at alternative methods. A shame, really.

Use proxy editing - This is the method which has brought me most success. If you use Vegas with a script such as Vasst Gearshift (decent info) or Proxy Stream(decent info), these scripts will create proxy files of your AVCHD files in a format of your choosing (I'm trying DV AVI at the mo). You edit the proxy files and then, when you're ready to export, you tell the script to replace the proxy files with the AVCHD files. If you wanted to, you could actually export from the proxy files instead if you're going to a low-res format... this would save time. I've found that the creating the proxy files can be slow, and exporting from AVCHD files likewise, but it's the method I'm pretty sure I'm going to stick with. If you use the Vegas trial, you'll find that Gearshift won't work. Proxy Stream will work fine though, and will basically provide you a free way of doing your on-tour editing :)

Like I said I'm new to this malarky as well, so others may have more to chip in!
Tim
 
My laptop is a year old Dell Core 2 Duo 1.5 with 4 gig memory.... Although I usually use my more powerful desktop - I still have edited the HMC150 footage on my laptop. It works great except for the occupational crash - save often! I use Vegas 9.0 now and its been better then 8.0.

Dont expect a good preview of your work before rendering - so I usually render a small SD version so I can preview. Then output high quality mp4 or mov.
 
You may be able to do it natively, I can "squeeze" out a native edit on my 3 yr old dual core laptop. But more likely you are better off proxy editing. Here are more updated instructions on using Proxy Steam.
 
DaFireMedic said:
You may be able to do it natively, I can "squeeze" out a native edit on my 3 yr old dual core laptop. But more likely you are better off proxy editing. Here are more updated instructions on using Proxy Steam.
Click to expand...
That would be nice, the thing is. I'm editing on someone elses computer who dosen't even have an editing program (I think he said he had some basic editing program) but, does vegas offer a full featured demo to download?
 
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