Why do i care?

Q

qap15

Well-known member
Yes i do care now. In two years i have owned these cameras which use the AVCHD codec, and i have always ignored any topic which had anything to do with the codec talk. Before everything sounded to me like they've used C# or assembly or perl, and i thought why should i know, i just want to shoot, bring the camera home and off load my contents into NLE and edit without getting into alot of details of what's taking place in the background, "NO" i'm being told after two years. I have been seeing talks about AVCHD beeing a highly compressed codec, and i thought so what, i'm getting what i want.
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Now to come to the point, all along what i didn't know was that this "highly compressed codec" being talked about was the cause of my hard drive problems, i have been buying hard drive after hard drive, it never occured to me that i was getting a kind of a compressed zip file which Prores was unzipping making them become really large files when transfered to the hard drive.

It was not until yesterday when i took time and looked at the log and transfer which showed that i had 50 gigs of space remaining and i thought that it should be enough for the 16 gig in the SD card, only to see a message on screen that i was running out of space.
Now i know what "highly compressed codec" means and i care. It is not that i didn't know that video takes a lot of space, i knew that, the thing that i didn't know was how AVCHD comes into play in relation to what the SD card takes in and what comes out.
 
Hi,

I don't quite follow what your question is. You seem to have described roughly the nature of codecs and their compression, but I'm not sure exactly what you're confused about. Yes, you'll start running out of disk space eventually, and if you're transcoding everything into ProRes then the highly efficient 16GB AVCHD footage will expand to maybe 50GB or more because you're converting it to the far less efficient ProRes codec. You're doing that to save your CPU from having to do the work on the fly, which is why you get such great framerates while editing.
 
Qap,

Perhaps you should have done a little bit of research before. This is nothing new and describes most video, audio, and still-image compression codecs.

Have you noticed that when you have a .zip file which is 50mb and unzip it, it can sometimes be 400+ mb? It's the same principle.

I transcode my AVCHD footage to AVC-Intra and it takes up 6x the space. This is common knowledge and, like Tiger, I'm not sure what your question is.
 
Alternatively - keep everything AVCHD - yes, you need a fast harddrive, or even better - two, plus some heavy duty ram and processor. But for the hours and hours you are going to save for years to come, why not make the investment upfront. hardrives are ridiculous cheap, one runs your system (editing + operating) and one has all your AVCHD files.
Editing native format on vegas 9.c is smooth, only slightly compromised with effects.

Win7, pro
3.0 Ghz core I7
12G 1600 mhz RAM
2 x 1TB Caviar Black
 
??? Avc is a small file compared to other formats. That's a blessing. In order to produce hd video it is necessary to have massive amounts of storage space. It is not avoidable.
 
Well, there is supposed to be an AVCHD plugin for FCP being released by panasonic as per NAB (fall I think), so if your computer is up to speed then you should be able to handle it natively at that time.
 
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