AVCHD & FCP Transcoded Sizes
 

I posted this in the General AVCHD discussion board, but no info yet.


Looking into the HMC-150. I do mostly wedding videos. Will FCP 6.0.5 play well with AVCHD?

When transcoding, what do the typical file sizes end up being? A GB per minute ration would be helpful.

We use three cameras at the ceremony and two at the reception. I know the HMC-150 looks good and SDHC cards are cheaper. However, I don't want to build another garage just to hold the hard drives to save these things.

Prores 422 (normal) 65Gb/hour
Comparatively speaking they are way bigger (7 times larger) than what you have on the SD card. The footage no doubt looks great but the transcoded files are large. Weddings could be and issue if you're used to DV or HDV sizes. You could use an app like Toast 9 and transcode to HDV or whatever codec you choose. Keep in mind that FCP only gives the option for ProRes or AIC and it must be with an Intel Mac.

I evaluated a HMC150 (I currently own a Sony EX1) and while it is a nice camcorder with a good lens and good image quality for it's price, I could not justify the workflow on the Mac. You want to use a flash-based system so you can do away with tape workflow and slowness, not make it worse.

At least on the Mac and FCP 6.0.5 the workflow is worse than tape. If you want to capture everything onto your system, you're talking a lot of time to transcode, and resulting files of 7-8 times the original in Prores files. Until FCP can use AVCHD natively it's just too much of a hassle for me to make this a primary camera if you have a lot of hours of footage for your projects. When I was using it I felt like I was going back a few years and really appreciating my XDCAM EX workflow and storage (and better image quality).

When the JVC camcorder that uses the XDCAM EX format came out I immediately decided against the HMC150 and returned it.

However I did like the weight, ergonomics, and the image quality of the HMC150 (sometimes).