AVCHD Support in Cineform NeoHD?
 

From what I've found in search, it appears Cineform does not support the AVCHD format in the software that works with Sony Vegas.

Does anybody know if there are any plans to add support for this codec? I'm thinking of buying the new Panasonic 150 3-chip camera and have read that it's fullHD 1920x1080 looks better than HDV. If that's the case, I've heard editing AVCHD on the timeline is worse than HDV, so I'd love to rip that footage directly into a Cineform format and work with that...

Jon

Please do a search on this forum about it and on the cineform help pages. Cineform supports AVCHD, you just need to install the AC3 free plugin, and buy the CoreAVC Pro plugin for $15.

Hmm.. Well then I'm glad I asked considering I searched in the forums for probably 15-20 mins and didn't find anything that clearly showed support. In addition, on the Cineform NeoHDV product page does it say *anything* about AVCHD support.
Neo HD/4K for Windows

One must ask, why the big secret? I would think this emerging video format which has difficulty being edited on a PC would be something Cineform would jump on to support.

No secret : AVCHD File Conversion

David, this is wonderful and I thank you very much for posting this information. This now puts that Panasonic camera right in the running for me as I now know I can use Cineform with it.

I would try to make a point to have your web programmer make this page accessable on your NeoHDV sales page beause, frankly, I nearly skipped over the whole process assuming that there was no AVCHD support happening with Cineform and I spent a fair amount of time on the site trying to find this page.

Thanks again,

Jon

Thanks Jon. The spec table on the Neo page is updated to be more clear.

Has anyone done this yet? How's the transcoding speed? Is the solution pretty robust?

OK, I just bumped into the same issue, but approached it differently.

Don't know what is installed on my PC, but AVCHD files do play back in QuickTime player - however HDLink crashes if I attempt to transcode them into CFHD.

Now, instead of installing additional software, I simply transcoded AVCHD to m2t first (using my TMPGEnc Xpress), then m2t to CFHD (using HDLink).

Yes, extra step - but the result is 100%, no issues, sound sync is perfect, picture is as... crappy... as it was in the original AVCHD file, so all is well :)

Interesting, are you sure there was no quality degredation here? I would think, going to an .m2t file would be transcoding from AVCHD's H.264 into HDV which would have to render some type of quality loss...

Jon

Jon, AVCHD seems to be of really inferior quality, so going to HDV does not really introduce any serious artifacts on its own - on top of AVCHD's.

I transcoded around 1.5 hours of 16mbps 1080i50 footage into CFHD 'medium quality' yesterday... took about four hours on a Q9300 quad core system with a single SATA drive. CPU usage across four cores went from 75% to 90% at any given moment.

I used CoreAVC and FFDshow tryouts to decode video and audio respectively. I dragged an .MTS file into Media Player, forced it to accept the .MTS suffix and then everything worked fine in HDLink.

Going from MPEG4 to MPEG2 to CineForm will of course impact quality to some degree. You're adding an extra - not especially impressive - compression scheme into the equation. The impact will of course depend on the quality of the footage, the amount of motion etc. I can also imagine that it will take longer than just doing it directly.

Yikes.. I might hold back on the HMC150... Can anyone comment whether Cineform is designed to work with 8 cores?

Just a point of minor interest, if one has Adobe Premiere CS3 or later installed, there is also no need to buy CoreAVC HD, as Premiere comes with the MainConcept h.264 decoder, which works as good as CoreAVC HD's decoder. On the other hand, Nero also comes with an h.264 decoder, but I'm not a fan of installing Nero without good cause.