What to do with GH2 footage?
 

My camera arrives tomorrow, and I have a lot to learn. I've been shooting with HD cameras for two years, shot in HD less than 5 times. Never produced a Bluray disc yet. Bottom line, I'm starting from scratch.

I'm shooting everything HD from this point out with this camera.

How does 1080i look downconverted, generally speaking? Is Cineform, which I have dodged using up to this point, the way to go with this footage?

I have Vegas 10 on a i7 and W7 and so far CF doesn't seem necessary. It plays smoothly in the timeline. What kind of hardware and software are you using?

Jeff i have used hd since 2005 with HDV, all my edited material is on Blu Ray i personaly dont do DVD for myself although 35min HD avchd discs can be useful. Editing avchd like the files from the GH2 is a pain at times for me and compared to HDV which was a breeze a struggle for my quad core pc and software to handle, when i used the canon 550D i had i made the films onto HDV tape first before capturing to hard drive and making BDs from that, as the GH2 has a little more resolution i want the full resolution on my Blu Rays so i hope to make full leghth BDs in 19200X1080P and i have made one so far but it is a slow progress compared to HDV sourced Blu Rays. Good Luck

Brian, Martyn, I have edited AVCHC once or twice, it sucked bad. My shoots are mostly multicamera, which will not make it any better.

I have an overclocked i7 920 at 3.66Ghz.

Guys, let's try and include our hardware/software specs when we discuss NLE performance.
The discussions won't mean much otherwise. I'm sure there are certain softwares that place nicer than others with regards to AVCHD.

I realize your on a PC, but for the record, on a Mac the GH2 imports into Final Cut Pro fast and easily straight to 24p. No "guessing" pull-down is required by software which makes it far faster than the GH1 is for me. I encode to ProRes 422. Systems used - 3Ghz Mac Pro 8-core and 2.93Ghz 12-core. If I have multiple cards, I have multiple USB readers. Mount all cards, change reel names so they're not all NO NAME, import, edit.

What PC software were you using? When I edit with Edius 6 I can drop the AVCHD footage right in my timeline and start editing. I believe both Premiere and Avid MC have to transcode, not sure. I have both but after I went to Edius I never went back to either software.
Windows7 Processor Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 CPU 920 @ 2.67GHz, 2668 Mhz, 4 Core(s), 8 Logical Processor(s) 12GB ram

I'm running an i7 930 notebook, 6GB of memory, win7, Adobe CS5 Production Premium suite. 1080p AVCHD at 24Mbs edits just fine for me. Premiere Pro scrubs nice and smooth.

I'm not doing anything too complicated, just the one camera, some light color correction and grading in After Effects, the random lower third title stuff, some motion graphics, output to blu-ray, DVD, and the usual on-line suspects. IOW, nothing too fancy.

If I were more ambitious I'd be using a workstation, 24GB RAM, and I'd probably transcode to a nicer editing CODEC like Cineform. But I'm not.

I'm just saying that an i7 can edit AVCHD just fine.

I set up a multicamera situation with some footage I shot this morning and found it to be sluggish. It might be workable, but I didn't try any color correction, etc., didn't have time.

Jeff, what software you using?

MBP Core2Duo 3.0, FCP7, and a eSATA RAID...

I always transcode AVCHD to ProRes422 (sometimes LT or Proxy, depending on importance of output quality). Otherwise, multicam editing just will not happen worth a darn.

Thanks, Kevin and Bruce. I think I'll look into Cineform. I strongly dislike the time spent processing, but editing 6-7 hours of multicam does not sound like a joy either.

Either that or I'll consider upgrading my hardware, or both. It always comes back to spending more money, doesn't it? Never ends!

Jeff, how many cameras? If it's not too many I think you could do it real time with Edius 6. Try downloading the demo and see for yourself.

two to three cameras, depending on the job. I have heard Edius can handle avchd well, but I do not wish to buy/learn a new program right now.

Good suggestion, thank you!