I haven't heard much good about it, either. Unfortunately, at the moment, it just isn't possible to enter the whole HD shooting arena without paying quite a bit, unless you're willing to settle for the aggravation involved with AVCHD. If only AVC-Intra were cheaper, and actually supported in anything other than FCP. I greatly prefer H.264 myself, but there doesn't seem to be a great solution for it yet at anything approaching a consumer or prosumer price-point.

I haven't done much HD editing myself; the little I've done so far has been with AVC footage taken off Blu-Rays as m2ts files... and really just for my own amusement. In those cases, I just converted the video into uncompressed AVI; at least it's easy to work with in that form.

It's not as though a consummer level HDV camera is expensive.
We bought a new old stock HC5 some time ago. Works amazingly well. We took it and my old Daiwa tripod to the NYE fireworks on Sydney Harbour. Selected the Fireworks profile and the results are not bad at all. I sure as heck would not have taken my EX1 and a big tripod into that mosh pit.

The AVCHD cameras fill a consummer space that's been empty since the days of VHS-C. You could take the tape out of those cameras and play it in your STB player. Simple. There was nothing in the 'DV Revolution' for the consummer. The direct to DVD camcoders were a train wreck.
With at least the Sony AVCHD camcorders you can pull the MS from the camera, plug it into a cheap DVD burner and burn the files onto a cheap red laser DVD to play back the 'movie' on a PS3 etc. That's ALL the consummers want, they very rarely will want to edit the footage. The reality is 99.99% of it will never even be watched. The editing problem of AVCHD just is not on the consummers radar. It's a struggle of titanic proportions to get them to use a tripod, mention a microphone and their eyes totally glaze over.

If I ever did get stuck with editing AVCHD I'd just take the same approach as Ushere, transcode it to something easier to edit, problem solved.

Bob.

simply put for me is the need for speed

i can shoot,edit and fly and i am getting more pixal quality than i need to output. AVCHD suits my needs
i have a decent PC a quad and a dual core both handle the content OK

it is lumpy to edit L and J cuts are an hassle and slow you down, so I do straight cuts where possible.

I think as newer PC's become quicker and better,AVCHD will get a better review.My personal opinion is that the shortfall is on the PC side.

Rory

I can speak as someone purely on the consumer level, 99% of my videos are of the kids, trips, family.

I bought the Sony HDR-CX12 AVCHD camera to replace my old TRV-140 single CCD camera.

I knew there'd be issues editing, but I had to get something better, and I didn't want to go the tape route.

It is slower editing, but doable for me, and my thinking is that PC speeds will catch up in the near future, and that future versions of editing programs such as Vegas Pro 9 will be able to handle AVCHD better.

In the mean time, yes, editing AVCHD is choppy.

I only once tried editing native AVCHD and that was enough to put me right off it. However like others I've noticed an interesting aspect to all these and other editing problems.

A couple of days ago I was testing my new MxR and SDHC cards with my EX1. Straight from the SDHC card, via USB 2, only a very low end Core Duo, I can get full frame rate playback of 35Mb/sec MP4 using VLC. Vegas has a hard time of it on a quad from a RAID 0 disk. Ppro doesn't do much better from the T/L either.
Both perform dramatically better in the trimmer. It seems to me that the overhead of playback from a T/L where there could be more than 1 track, where there could be all manner of other things involved, takes a serious toll on playback. Also hardware acceleration would work much better for a trimmer than a T/L. There's only one vision stream to deal with in a trimmer. Perhaps it's time to go back to the more traditional way of editing than we get into the habit of doing in Vegas.

So can someone tell me that has a AVCHD camera, what's the playback like in the trimmer?

Bob.

I find the consumer level avchd cams to be a rather interesting situation. IMO, it's not the avchd that the consumers are interested in anywhere near as much as it is the new media that it's being recorded on. (hard drives, and flash).

As far as the avchd itself goes.... I believe it's a really great delivery format.... but it absolutely stinks for anything else. Avchd in cams have ADDED levels of complication instead of removing them and it has also turned out to be a bit of a lie. One of the original goals of avchd was an equal to or better quality level in a smaller package which has not really turned out to be that true. Now it is true that these avchd cams have surpassed the resolution of HDV.... but then again that has more to do with the medium as opposed to the codec.

The bottom line from my perspective anyway is that avchd has done little more than complicate our lives and has brought very little advantage along with it.

Perhaps someone using the new NEO Scene can elaborate if this helps with any of the issues of AVCHD in editing.
JJK

I've played with that a little and yes it does help. But the point is that to do anything serious with avchd requires just that.... transcoding it to something else first. What also complicates the situation is that the scenes are split within the cam and come out individually upon import to your drive (unlike tape which can be captured as a whole. This makes it difficult to treat the situation on any kind of mass level. For example... if I want to (for what ever reason) demux the audio in TSmuxer with a tape I can do one file (which may contain 200 scenes). With avchd cams... I have to demux 200 individual scenes.

Which brings up another issue... as I understand it, most or all of the new Canon avchd cams have a 999 scene limit regardless of any room that you may have left on your media. I don't think the Sony cams have this issue though.

> So can someone tell me that has a AVCHD camera, what's the playback like in the trimmer?

Sure Bob. I just bought a Sony HDR-CX12 and the trimmer plays back at 29.970 here in the US (NTSC). This is on Windows Vista 64 with Vegas Pro 8.1 or 8.0. I also get 29.970 on the timeline until I hit a transition or for scenes with very fast motion (I guess the decoder has to work harder when there is more delta movement information between intra-frames).

Like you, I bought a CX12 to use in places that I didn't want to take my HVR-Z1U or HVR-A1U. I'm also taking a lot more family videos with the CX12 because it's just so darn convenient to use My experience with so far AVCHD has been fine. It's not as bad to edit as I thought it would be.

~jr

I have a Canon HF11. I record at the max quality settings of 24 mbps AVCHD. Being as my computer is relatively old, playing back the clips in WMP11 is not realtime. The convenience of file based acquisition outways the pains of editing. I will explore Neo Scene as an intermediate.

As an aside, AVC is still relatively new. As such, I doubt most of the software out there is optimized for performance. Remember the discussions a couple of years ago about what a pain HDV was to edit.

Hi,

I user AVCHD files on a regular basis. I do NO transcoding - on a fast PC it is not needed. I'm running on a quad core QX9650 clocked at 3,8GHz, and can do AVCHD editing in real time, and do renrering even faster...

If I do crossfades or some more advanced color correction, then I have to go slightly down in the preview quality (half resolution) and I'm back up to the full frame rate...

The quality of AVCDH clips is just stunning. My subjective opinion is that AVCHD looks clearly better than HDV. I have shot exatly the same (well lit) scenes using my HC1 and SR12, attached to the same tripod. Then I have put the clips on the timeline and rendered both at 1440 x 1080i and 1920 x 1080i formats to bluray. Watching these on a full HD 55 inch Sony screen - you can see the difference in this A/B test clearly. Hard to say if the better quality is due to the different sensors or the differences in the delivery/storage formats, but the SR12 looks always sharper/better in stills, and much better especially during moving images... Both cams suffer from the rolling shutter effect, but that's another story...

I know that this comparison is not fair, if you just want to compare 16mbit/s AVCHD with 25mbit HDV - and not the sensors and different source resolutions. Anyhow it seems that AVCHD is even at the lower bitrate (due to the better encoding) always sharper by a clear margin.

There is nothing wrong with AVCDH format, it provides excellent quality. This is - if you do not consider the need for high processor power it requires for smooth editing... I'm running completely smooth with my one year old PC : ) On a really fast PC AVCHD editing is OK´, without proxies...

Christian

"Then I have put the clips on the timeline and rendered both at 1440 x 1080i and 1920 x 1080i formats to bluray. "

But HDV is 1440x1080 and the sr12 is (I think) 1920x1080... is this not correct?

The increased resolution of the sr12 has little to do with the avchd but rather the medium being recorded to. (tape won't handle 1920x1080).

I suppose a better comparison would be a avchd cam at 1440x1080 compared to HDV at 1440

The other thing is (and please correct me if I'm wrong) but in reading various posts on these new Canon avchd cams that record at 24Mbps... there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of difference in noticeable quality between a recording at 24M as opposed to 17M. Is this correct?

I will add this as well. As I said above, I find this whole avchd thing very interesting.... in more ways than just a few. I find it interesting that nobody has really come forth and offered a choice or a comparison of avchd vs mpeg2 in a hard drive or flash scenario in a consumer camcorder. The only one to come forth and offer this has been JVC... but their cams traditionally speaking have never really been able to compete with the quality of Sony/Canon. I would love to see a mpeg2 hardrive cam of Sony/Canon caliber at 1920x1080 so that we could REALLY compare.

HI,

Even if considerably smooth editing is possible (with some compomizes in preview quality) with AVCHD - - - it does NOT mean that improvement is still required !!!

SCS - have you already implemented SSE4 technology in VP 8.0c/8.1???

Many of us have capable and SSE4.1 compatible processors - why not use this vast improvement in video editing using these commands???

I have the feeling that SSE4.1 was NOT included in the latest releases - is Sony waiting for the 9.0 release?

I certainly hope so !!! Then we would see a dramatical increase in render speeds...

Probably no use to ask SCS about Nvidias CUDA technology - will it ever be implemented??? Such a waste of computing power sitting already there on our desktops...

Professional video editing normally uses some hardware based solutions anyhow...

Christian

I use AVCHD clips in Vegas 8 all the time w/no problems, no need to transcode, just drag the clips into the timeline from within Vegas' explorer (not windoze) and it works fine... the new sony avchd I got is a rockstar camcorder, forgot the model, has like an 80 gig hd in it, though I record to the 8GB memory chips. It's incredible to see how great footage turns out, and No More need to capture digital tape footage is a huge timesaver.

-k

I've been struck by the number of times that people having serious problems editing recently have been using AVCHD and would like to hear some other experiences to get a perspective on this.

There are a lot of different kinds of AVCHD from a lot of kinds of cameras. What flavor are you talking about? Vegas 8 only works with a few natively. The ones it does work with, it does a great job with a fast quad core or i7.

I've only encountered AVCHD once so far, about a year ago - a request to edit a wedding shot by a rich novice in Bali, and editing was so lumpy that I immediately rendered it all to DV avi and life became normal again.

Before 8.0c and especially with any version of 7, Vegas was not really usable with AVCHD. What you did a year ago has nothing to do with today. Since a year ago, there are also a lot of new AVCHD cameras which use much tougher versions of the codec. AVCHD is still way ahead of the NLEs to be sure.

I can understand that this is a cheap way for folks to enter the HD world, and I agree that it looks great played straight from the camera, but don't you think that purchasers should be advised that satisfactory editing involves the creation of proxies - or is that out of date?

Im not sure about it being any cheaper. A good AVCHD camera still costs $3,500 and you need the same support equipment as any camera. I agree with the other poster that you don't need anything but a good quad core machine for editing. However, Vegas still chokes on a lot of AVCHD variants, 720P60 24MBPS for instance.

For me, I have switched over to HMC-150 AVCHD cameras. It has worked out well so far and my video looks better than ever. Codec wise, AVCHD looks a lot better than HDV to me, all the way through to the NTSC DVD end product I usually author.

I shoot with an SR12 set to the highest quality, edit with Vegas 8.1 x64, i7 Extreme overclocked to 3.7ghz, 12 gigs of ram, Vista x64.. I bought myself an early xmas gift when the i7 came out primarly because my old machine was having problems with AVCHD.. :)

After reading this thread, I was thinking to myself, damn I'm not able to preview realtime and 1920x1080 29fps. With a machine as fast as mine how is this possible?

So i went digging and it turns out I turned on 32bit precision for the pixel format since the SR12 supports x.v.Color. There is a dramatic difference in the fidelity of the picture by setting it to 8bit pixel format, but voila I can edit and preview at full resolution.

I think I'm going back to my work around though -- I'm previewing at 960x540 29fps just fine and then I don't loost the 32bit precision when I render. And actually reading the help in Vegas on the Pixel format setting, I probably could just leave it at 8 bit during the edit process and turn on 32bit when rendering. Not sure which path I'll take.

Cheers,
Brian

I bought a Sony SR11 (60 gig hard drive, otherwise same as SR12) and love it. Editing things for the family or church have been so much faster. Quad core qx6700 no overclocking. Quality looks very similar to the FX1 I was shooting with.

As computers keep getting faster (or more cores) the editing pains of complex compression keep going away.

Sean

I shoot AVCHD every week, but I surely convert to something else before editing. I have tried the native editing too, and it was no good, and in my oppinion it will never be. If you put a conversion into your workflow it will be ok.

I like the tapeless workflow for dayli regular shootings. You can hold 2 hrs. of best quality on a 16 GB card for $100, that's just great.

I would love a reasonable priced unit that I could use with either SD or CF cards on both my FX7 and XHA1 to record HDV, because the possibilities with theese cams are of course much more extended than a small Canon HF100 for $1K.

/Ulf

I just cut over 100 videos from a world record wingsuiting event, all from CX7, CX6, and CX12s, plus a Vixia thrown in for good measure.
If the system is managed right, it works great. OTOH, the AVCUpShift set to 25Mbps works great too.

Picture quality is decent, and if you set the CX series to underexpose by -1, you get a significantly more saturated image. I like em' for what they are. Crash cams, sport cams, skydiving/paragliding/balloon cams, strut cams for light aircraft...they rock.
Shooting a training DVD...not so much. they need LIGHT.

The other thing is (and please correct me if I'm wrong) but in reading various posts on these new Canon avchd cams that record at 24Mbps... there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of difference in noticeable quality between a recording at 24M as opposed to 17M. Is this correct?

From what I have read somewhere, you can only record 24 Mb/s on the built in memory, or using a super fast SD card. If the SD card is not class (6) or better, i belive the camera will silently lower the bit stream rate without notifying you. When using a very low class SD card, you will be notified though.
I bought Canon HF 10 shortly before HF 11 was available, and am not very happy with not waiting for HF 11 :-)

From what I have read somewhere, you can only record 24 Mb/s on the built in memory, or using a super fast SD card. If the SD card is not class (6)

Thats right. Class 4 can tranfer data at 20Mb/s. The newer Canon HF11 captures at 24 Mb/s so you'd have to get a Class 6 SD card. That's also why you can't use the "disc" based cams to capture AVCHD because they are too slow to capture HD. Some reviews say they can't see the difference between the two. However you should see better quality with the HF11 on faster motion footage.
I have the HF10 and am very impressed with it and I use a class 4 SD card.

Wait a minute... once againg someone is confusing megaBITS per second (Mb/s - small b) with megaBYTES per second (MB/s - large B). When talking about video data rates, they are usually discussed in megabits per second, SD card speeds are usually discussed in megabytes per second. Therefore, 24 megabit AVCHD video is only just over 3 megabytes per second.

Also, if the speed of the card is sufficient and the video data rate is the same, there should not be any difference in image quality.