Ok, first wedding with new Sony NX3 cams and imported. I m not sure that at my level, I need any additional features that AVCHD provides and should be fine with MP4. I could convert but that of course is another step and would take hours I assume. The camera can be set to shoot 720 MP4, but would of course assume that a blu ray (or hd file) would be a noticeable quality drop from the full HD of the AVCHD, correct?

I previously shot to tape, ingested as 1440 X 1080 and had a file for each tape (generally an hour) and was very easy for me to edit and manipulate for various formats.

By the time I imported the footage and joined clips, I still ended up spending a few hours waiting for everything to be ready. I then had the heart attack of no audio, which was Windows Media Player not playing audio from the AVCHD, but NLE all were fine.

Any thoughts and suggestions would be great, thanks all.

Some NLEs like AVCHD better than MP4, some the opposite.

IMO, it's worth a bit of testng to get to a workflow that doesn't involve transcoding your imported files but gives you the quality you want.

Burning 2 hours to DVD now, been an hour and half and states only at 16% finished. Does AVCHD take longer to transcode/convert for DVD?

It depends.

Sorry if that's not real helpful, but really, different NLEs (or encoders) may work more efficiently with one format or the other, and may or may not take care of hardware acceleration that may be available on the GPU.

Fundamentally, as I understand it, the compression math is not so different between equivalent MP4 and AVCHD. Yet we see these differences in performance. Go figure.

Hi Darryn,

It's hard to make a comment on expected performance when we don't know what NLE software you are using, general computer specs, workflow, etc., all makes a difference. But from what you've said, that is way too slow. Please elaborate on software, hardware, workflow used.

Thanks