XAVC S vs .MP4 vs AVCHD

wilri001 wrote on 5/15/2017, 9:08 PM

I'm looking at either the Sony FDR-AX53 4K or Panasonic HC-VX981K 4K.

The Panasonic records 4k at 72Mbps .MP4, and the Sony XAVC S at 100Mbps.

I've read XAVC/S is intraframe encoding and supposed to be better for editing.

I will be using it in a 4 camera 35-40 minute video each week. Obviously, I will be using a proxy, but there's still the time to build the proxy and rendering.

So any thoughts about which format will give the best picture at the lowest resource usage? Or thoughts about which camera is best for other reasons?

Comments

john_dennis wrote on 5/15/2017, 10:58 PM

Everything being equal (it never is) I would prefer to have LPCM audio from the XAVC format than AAC compressed audio from the MP4 wrapper. It won't matter if the audio from that particular camera is not used in the final project, though.

"I've read XAVC/S is intraframe encoding and supposed to be better for editing."

That's not what I'm seeing:

I suspect you'll find the Intra variant in an MXF wrapper:

Someone can check me on that. I haven't seen samples from every camera, yet.

As to better for editing...

Musicvid wrote on 5/16/2017, 7:31 AM

XAVC-S is interframe, I believe.

wilri001 wrote on 5/16/2017, 7:43 AM

Yes, Musicvid, it's the XAVC-I that's intraframe. Thanks for the correction!