AVCHD Importing

AGB Productions wrote on 6/3/2010, 1:08 PM

Just purchased a Sony AVCHD camera (AXR-2000, I believe). After loading the appropriate drivers into my 32-bit machine and formatting the SD chips, I shot some footage ("byteage?") of a concert as a "C" camera last weekend. I'm getting ready to import the video this coming weekend. Anything I need to know before I take the plunge?

Other cameras are Sony Z1's and a small Panasonic HDV hard disk.

The AVCHD camera manual says very little.
The drivers and opening screen that came with the camera say very little.
Vegas 9d apparently has the capability to edit once it is imported.

I'm just concerned that there's some "gotcha" ("Didn't we tell you?") that's lurking out there, something that will make AVCHD incompatible for capturing or importing (which?).

Also, the cute little 32 GB SD chips came with a USB card extender, but with frantic instructions telling me not to even think of accessing the AVCHD movie directory on the chip. There goes the idea of merely copying and pasting the file.

Thought I'd ask here first. Some of you folks may have "been there, done that."

Thanks ...

Comments

warriorking wrote on 6/3/2010, 1:39 PM

From what I can gather from you camcorder specs you only have to plug your camcorder VIA USB and drag your files onto the computers HD..I do the same with my Canon HG21 and HG10. Don't worry.Vegas handles AVCHD quite easily, just make sure you have a robust system to work with, otherwise you might choose to use neoscene or another program to convert your AVCHD footage to a easier editing format....AVCHD can be a bear on underpowered systems.... other than that no problems on the Vegas side...

AGB Productions wrote on 6/3/2010, 2:46 PM

Thanks. Looking forward to it (I think).

The computer mother board is two years old, upgraded just before the 64-bit stuff hit the fan. We're still running Win-XP Pro 32-bit (ignoring Vista after we heard reports from MANY others), with ~4 GB of memory and ~4 GHz dual processor power, so we should be OK there. Don't have the exact specs in front of me, so I'm probably talking out of a very dark space on my body.

Tune in next week ... :-)

rmack350 wrote on 6/3/2010, 3:26 PM

I'm just barely starting to poke at this with a Panasonic GH1 still camera. I think the way to acquire media will be for you to connect the camera to the PC and use Vegas' Device Explorer to fetch the media.

AVCHD takes a lot of horsepower to play well on the timeline. Performance is much better in the trimmer without any timeline overhead. Hopefully SCS will tune this up someday.

Rob Mack

K-Decisive wrote on 6/4/2010, 10:11 AM

There are a lot of posts in this forum about handling AVC or H264 by converting to other formats like sony MXF,AVID dnxhd and cineform. Or converting to proxies for editing then switching back to the source material for rendering. Search on "H264" and you will find a whole bunch of info.

AGB Productions wrote on 6/4/2010, 5:03 PM

Well, we did it.

The funky utility that came with the camera tried to load it on our "C" drive ("My Videos").

For some vague reason known only to the Sony camera folks, we had to "register" a drive. In other words, let's say my project assets were to be located in V:/100530_Spring_Concert. I imported my Sony Z1 camera assets, my Panasonic staring HD camera assets, and the multiple sound tracks into that folder, which would also contain the *.veg file(s).

Well, I wanted to tell this utility to stick my files there, not in the default folder ("My Videos").

This funky word "register" sounded like "register my product." Not true. I just meant that, in so doing, this folder was now mysteriously eligible for uploading files. I wish these morons would work from a common dictionary.

Once the files were uploaded, importing them into Vegas 9d was easy. It sits as one of the many tracks on the timeline, and is being edited just like any other video track.

After the video edit and follow-on audio edit [REMINDER: audio files are MORE IMPORTANT than video files -- you might watch a bad video with good audio, but you won't watch a good video with bad audio, because the brain processes sound before it processes sight], we should have the draft out this weekend to our customer.

Thanks, folks, for your comments