Kaushik, my version has the option for 5.1 EXPORT.

But, I can't find anything on:

1) Importing AC3 5.1 from the Sony SR12.

2) Surround-sound panners to move either a mono or stereo around in 2D space.

3) Creating an LFE channel.

Unless, these functions are present -- outputting 5.1 only outputs stereo in 5.1.

It's in last month's Broadcast Engineering. This week I'm finishing one on CCD & CMOS for BE. Next, one on Smart GOP Splicing.

The Pana HDC150 looks to be a great camcorder -- if the street price is low enough. I can imagine a JVC "version" that uses three 1280x720 CMOS chips, perhaps from Sony. And, a V1 replacment from Sony. And, Canon could join the ranks. The thing to remember is AVCHD, like HDV, is a brand name. These camcorders may not all be branded "AVCHD."

Steve,

I don't even slightly buy into your opinion that AVCHD will become the wedding and event photographer "prosumer" format you claim.

It is my belief that the emerging 24 Mbit/sec AVCHD camcorders will merely serve to update the presently released consumer 17-21 Mbit/sec models, which are clearly aimed at consumers, sell for about $1000 or less, and, with the sole exception of one single $4000 Panasonic model, have virtually no features which professionals demand on their camcorders for event use.

Even if such a second stage of AVCHD camcorders should ultimately arrive which are marketed and adopted for prosumer use, it is entirely obvious that the rapid improvement in computer and graphics accelerator speeds will most likely also render your "professional NLE" argument moot, since the transcoding method used by Edius and others to make huge AVI files, at slow speeds, out of AVCHD, merely reflects, as you correctly state, today's inadequate processor capacity. With the way things are obviously heading, many cores and video card assisted rendering will totally handle AVCHD without even the slightest thought of going into a transcoded intermediate format at all.

Thus it is entirely possible that should AVCHD become the event and prosumer choice in some future timeframe, that professional NLEs will no longer need to either transcode to AVI or create small proxy files in order to be useable.

No doubt there will continue to be a need for general purpose, multi-format NLEs, in which video from many different sources can be mixed and matched, allowing camera crews and other multi-sourced content to be edited and assembled into unified programs.

It should be clear to you that the reason your Edius choice for AVCHD is, as you say, so popular at NBC or other TV networks is NOT that it handles AVCHD well or efficiently. It is entirely about the versatility of being able to use a wide variety of formats, a situation which broadcasters and news gatherers face all the time.

You are conflating and confusing these professional needs which very legitimately justify products such as Edius and Final Cut Pro with the needs of today's AVCHD user. This is what my counter-argument and response in this thread is all about.

Since my 5 recommendations are at "the bottom of your list", I certainly would like to know which NLEs are at "the top of your list" for AVCHD use.

Speaking for myself, I would gladly exchange the wider range of effects, transitions, titles, and other glitz which the more elaborate and expensive NLEs provide for the speed, ease of use, and, (most of all) the clarity and detail which 'Smart Rendering' provides. The fact that the NLE costs 60 bucks versus 1300 matters not at all to me, since I personally decided to buy over a dozen NLEs including some very expensive ones like Final Cut Pro HD, and my personal AVCHD choice and recommendations are entirely driven by what I find myself using based on ultimate image quality and ease of use / speed, not cost. Most consumers, however, do not buy a dozen or more NLE programs, but instead rely on reviews and the opinions of others to help make an informed choice. And most of the time they prefer less expensive if possible.......

You and I differ profoundly on our perceptions of AVCHD demographics, market directions, editing philosophy, and which NLEs make sense today for AVCHD.

You clearly are comfortable with longer waits, greater expense, and recompression, and I am not. My goal is not to change your mind, or convince you of the error of your ways, since there is clearly room for a wide variety of approaches available for Don and others to chose from. Only time will tell whether your prediction of AVCHD as the format of choice for prosumer use will emerge, and any claims you or I want to make in forecasting future outcomes are, at best, highly speculative. For the time being, however, I would not consider Edius, Final Cut, or any other general purpose NLE to be either the 'only' solution or the "best" solution for Don or most other AVCHD users, with the possible exception of those who must mix HD content from a variety of sources.

Larry

Thanks Ron for your feedback. Believe it or not, I actually did read the "How to Use the AVC2HQ Converter" pdf file before trying to do the conversions and found that only one of the 2 described methods works on my machine, the right click. The drop and drag method which apparently works much faster on some machines but not mine could be a much better solution.

Perhaps this function may be unavailable because I am using Vista? I make this comment because all of the other Edius versions are not supported under Vista, only the Neo version I installed, and perhaps this Neo version of Edius still has some unsupported features.

Frankly, even with your faster conversion times of a little over real-time, I would not have the slightest desire to wait an hour or more to convert my AVCHD to some other format even if this faster method worked on my Vista machine,and I clearly have no interest in waiting nearly 5 hours using the current verion of Edius as it now runs on my machine.

Larry

Well, from pure IT standing point, it's clear that it's better that the workflow should be in original format, and it's better to smartrender.
This discusion reminds me the moment when Ulead had the first NLE with smartrendering. Many Premiere users considered that it's a useless gimmick, and even Adobe doesn't bother to implement. And it also reminds me the price difference and easy of use between Premiere and Ulead...

Of course Nero has limitations (well, one funny is that it's player Showtime can't play AVCHD DVD created with Vision, but PowerDVD can), but for me to make an AVCHD DVD is the easiest way (other than copy original files to DVD). The Picture Motion Browser that came with my camera is the biggest POS (it doesn't work at all, and at FAQ it stated that if you have any other codec installed it will not work).

I found the same problem -- also under Vista. AVCHD really needs to be part of EDIUS, not a utility.

I think we have arrived at that "we agree to disagree" point. And you might be surprised that I run into the same debate when I tell FCP users about iMovie 08. They simply refuse to believe it can do so much so FAST. And, for only $85.

There's nothing new about all this. When FCP shipped the "famous" Avid editors claimed nothing could be done with it. Now most of them use FCP.

So, I'll try Nero -- at least for home movies.

PS: We both agreed Pinnacle made "poor quality" AVCHD discs. I found the same with CyberLink. Have you found this?

I run Edius on Vista 64. It's only Canopus hardware that isn't supported. The software products work just fine. It is necessary to set up the converter first before use so that the conversion parameters are set and the directory used also set.

There is a big difference in needs for a home video needing no changes other than maybe a title at the front etc and the needs of a professional/prosumer or hobby like mine that need to edit a 4 camera shoot of a event of over 2 hours in high definition shot on different cameras. I always have to colour balance some of the cameras. For the tape based HDV the capture is realtime, for the AVCHD its about the same ( advantage is I don't have the problem of tape changing and it mixes well with the FX1's used).

As I have said, anyone buying a Sony AVCHD doesn't really need to buy anything else to produce SD DVD's or AVCHD DVD's as the Sony Browser software is adequate for a beginners needs. As to the large file sizes anyone used to editing HDV with Cineform or Canopus HQ is well aware of the advantages in using an intermediate file format rather than the long GOP whether that is MPEG2 or H262 based.

I do also believe that when the new range of cameras come out AVCHD will displace some of the HDV. For weddings and events not having to change tapes over a long period of time, being able to instantly review clips, have easy clip management on transfer to PC etc etc will be a big advantage. I can see that Sony will need to bring out a competitive product to the new

Panasonic, maybe a fixed lens version of the Z7 or similar and I for one will likely buy one. Bluray or hard drive backup is just fine. Cost of Bluray is really no more than long standard size DV/HDV tapes( in fact a little cheaper at the moment). I just backed up 5 hours of AVCHD on a 50G Bluray for $37. Tape equivalent( large standard tape) could not hold as long a time and is $45.

Ron Evans

Mircea,

I also recall the smartrender argument coming up with HDV a few years ago for Ulead, and I felt the same way then about the benefits. Native editing just makes more sense to me when the original h.264 format is achieved by throwing away a large amount of information through an irreversible, lossy compression process.

Larry

Steve,

Nero is worth playing with, and demonstrates the claims of speed and quality I have been ranting about. No doubt you will (as I did) find it almost comically spartan in terms of its features, and yet I find myself using it often just to quickly get the job done.


Bad analogy, but it's like the large drill press I have in my shop here. It's a wonderful, beautifully made, very competent drill, but yet I always seem to grab and use my little hand-held battery-operated drill whenever I have a hole to drill....

My Cyberlink PowerDirector 7 experiences are mixed regarding quality. In the original and first updated releases, there was no smart rendering of AVCHD, and the finished disks really looked poor. Then in the latest Build 1915 AVCHD smart rendering was implemented, worked correctly, and made a very visible improvement in their resulting disks. Only problem is that the Build 1915, at least on my machine, has a lot of bugs, including bugs in burning disks which did not exist in prior builds. I thus have to use a different program to burn the AVCHD image since PowerDirector 7 crashes during burning.

When (and if) they figure out how to get PD7 to run properly, it will be a very nice program for the money. I dinged it heavily on the magazine website where Jan Ozer rated it as the best of the current low cost editing suites, particularly since his review was of the original release, a bug-ridden POS in my opinion.

Larry

Yes, CyberLink's PowerDirector 7 is worst if we try to produce AVCHD, means AVC.MPEG4. But I simply love PowerDirector 7, I have made some nice slideshow with it if some one is interested here is link: http://www.vimeo.com/1639491
http://www.vimeo.com/1636736

Ron,

Please elaborate as to how to set up the convertor first before use. There is no ducomentation provided in that specific topic nor is there any obvious way to adjust settings of the convertor once using it.

Only time will tell how AVCHD will truly evolve. With disk space and especially flash memory becoming so extremely cheap, it makes less sense to capture HD with cameras that struggle with motion artifacts and compression workloads demanded by AVCHD. I actually could envision a totally lossless or far less lossy eventual successor to these very highly compressed capture methods, but who really knows?

As regards BluRay versus tape, I am just plain old fashion. I have literally thousands of DVDs I've made here in various stages of rot after only a few years, some of them used brand name blanks, so I am altogether skeptical of optical storage longevity and stability. I generally prefer harddisk backups, where your 50 GB example might cost me 7 to 10 dollars versus your $37. I also hate to wait for recording, rendering, etc. (probably a sign of the retirement age I have reached (-: ) but I especially like to write my 50 GB backup in seconds rather than many minutes or even hours for a BluRay duallayer disk disk you used as an example. As the prices come down on BluRay blanks I may switch back to optical again for archiving.

Larry

I am fully agreed with you Larry; your observation regarding PowerDirector 7, indeed it is great for beginner! And it is so simple to use. I was so much exited about new version PD7, but I am much disappointed with it, first of all it is same not much different, they try to give more professional look like and they succeed, now it looks better!

But it crashed so many times; even I downloaded some patches as well but no improvement.

They have added very nice features in slideshow part, full marks to CyberLink for such innovative features!

I made some slideshows with PD7 and here is link if someone is like to see: JVC GZ-HD7 slideshow on Vimeo
Philips @ IFA 2008, Berlin on Vimeo

Kaushik

Kaushik,

Your two movies show the very nice ability of PD7 to do many different effects and picture-in-picture, and this is probably why it got the highest rating by PC Magazine / Jan Ozer since it allows for spectacular effects. (I wish I was able to attend that Berlin show you visitied!)

AVCHD is the area where PD7 is so weak. It has not been tested and debugged properly, and the support from Cyberlink is poor. My comments and complaints were strictly as an AVCHD user. I will also mention that their earlier version PD6 was pretty poor with HDV, so I don't respect their quality at all.

The latest patcher on their website to the new build is quite an improvement in some areas, but a step back in others. This is another sign of their weak software quality. The program is still a bargain if someone knows how to work around the various issues.

Larry

Bravo!
 

...to the knowledgable posters in this thread. Thanks for all of your important information--I hope to be able to purchase some gear and look forward to sharing parts of my efforts with you on this board.

Please continue the dialog...we're reading and learning out here in beginner-land.

Yes Larry, PD7 has some innovative features in slideshow part; it has so many options also for creating nice slideshow. And I love to watch in to big screen via projector! And other end it required much improvement in videos editing part, but I am sure CyberLink's creative team is aware about this and will come out soon with more strength!

But I really love PD7, despite of some error!

Kaushik

Hi Larry
There should be three icons on the desktop for the converter. AVCHD2HQ, AVCHDPRV, and HQ codec setup. Under the setup its possible to set for standard or fine conversion and alter the parameters though standard is the one I use. One can also set whether the conversion is to ITU601 or from RGB ( 0-255 to IRE 0 to 100). If you drag a file over the preview icon it will play in a preview window, Opening the AVCHD2HQ will allow you to set whether the sound conversion is to 2 channel or 5.1. When you make this selection another box will open allowing you to choose the directory for the converted file. I make sure the directory for the converted file is on another hard drive from the source file, much faster. Once this is set dragging a file over the ICON will use these set parameters until you change them. The problem with defaults for Sony and Edius etc is that they are all on the boot drive and so this poor drive has to keep swapping back and for as well as manage all the access that Windows wants!!!! Don't use the boot drive for any of the video source or destination. For me a PC needs 4 drives for nice clean video performance. boot, temp and preview, and two for storage.

Ron

Kaushik,

I really hope they fix the remaining bugs since most of PD7 is really very well done, and their slideshow features are excellent as your samples demonstrate.

If you have a projector connected directly to a computer and can display computer video without using mpeg / h.264 encoding, I can also recomend another very low cost slideshow program developed in Russia which makes outstanding slideshows, is very low cost, and makes either high def AVI / mpeg files, and also executable .exe files which display full photo resolution content without any mpeg / h.264 degredation. Of the dozen or more slideshow programs I have been experimenting with over the last few years, it has become one of my favorites. It is called MySlideShowGold from Anix Software. I have worked with the developer, Andrew Anoshkin, on a couple beta releases to help him debug it. If you like slideshows, you should check out the trial version. See:

MySlideShow - software for creating slide shows, photo albums, screen savers, presentations, video files, VideoCD and DVD

Best,

Larry

Last night I got Vegas 9 Plat up and running. Very nice for $85.

BUT

Sony seems to have designed its export options to force one to buy DVD ARCH 5.

1) AVCHD uses AC3 or stereo PCM. Sony does not support AC3! And, if you have made a 5.1 soundtrack -- a really neat feature of Vegas -- you are forced to burn a multi-channel LPCM track. Unfortunately, this track cannot be sent via SPdif to your home theater receiver as the bandwidth is way too large.

2) BD also uses AC3 or stereo PCM. Sony does not support AC3! And, if you have made a 5.1 soundtrack you are forced to burn a multi-channel LPCM track. Unfortunately, this track cannot be sent via SPdif to your home theater receiver as the bandwidth is way too large.

So you can make SD DVD with AC3, but not HD DVDs. Which makes the claims of AC3 support very misleading if you work in HD.

3) We all know that AVCHD is DVD-+R and not BD. But, the AVCHD settings are under BD, not DVD. So the co-inventor of AVCHD has an NLE that has no direct burn-to-AVCHD function! And, the main inventor of BD -- won't burn a BD with an AC3 track.

4) We also know BD supports up to 40Mbps yet Sony limits AVC to 20Mbps and MPEG-2 to 25Mbps. Why is Sony limiting our quality?

The solution -- which I posted on the Sony site -- is to buy Ulead MovieFactory which has clear choices for AVCHD and BD and HD DVD. Now you can do anything you want. And, in the past, I've found if you import a "correct" file -- it does not recompress. Although, you might want to export uncompressed from Vegas and let MF do the encoding since you have more control.

Larry,

I have checked "MySlideShow" software, and I would like to tell you this is nowhere near to PowerDirector 7, it is normal slideshow creator. I must say PowerDirector rules in slideshow part! As you said you liked my two clips, it came out excellent!

If you have not explore PD7' slideshow features I would recommend you to see them!

Kaushik

Looks like Sony is going to keep HDV alive in the Prosumer space.

The new $4000 Sony HDR-FX1000 HDV camcorder features 3 x 1/3-inch CMOS sensors. The lens is non-removable. The lens has three control rings: focus, zoom, and iris. There are also three built-in ND filters (1/4, 1/16, and 1/64). The camcorder includes a 3.2-inch LCD with a resolution of 921,000 pixels.

Wonder if they will ALSO release a non-tape $4000 camcorder using AVCHD.

Steve,

Have you gone through my slideshows clips? see: http://www.vimeo.com/1639491
http://www.vimeo.com/1636736

Kaushik

It is true Kaushik that MySlideShow Gold does not create anywhere near the range of special effects of Power Director 7, and is not a good alternative in this comparison. However, it generates direct output to projectors or monitors without requiring any encoding, and our photography club chose it to use for displaying digital photos on our club projection system since it preserves as much detail as possible from 4-12 megapixel images when shown on our projection system at 1920 by 1080 HD resolution. With PD7 and other video editing programs which support slideshows, the output slideshow is a DVD, HD DVD, AVCHD, or BluRay disk encoded as a video / movie with the added encoding artifacts. I suggested it mostly for this reason. It also has the nice ability to take a set of photos and build a self-contained executatble program which can be emailed or delivered on a CD to someone who does not have any hi def equipment but who does have a computer and monitor. It will play at the computer's maximum screen resolution, again with noform of encoding / compression other than the original JPEG, preventing the effects of applying mpeg2 or mpeg4 encoding on top of JPEG. For our photography club members, this is the way people bring their photo results into the photo class room as well. I thought you might find it interesting. Also, at $29 it is less than half the price of ProShow Gold from Photodex, a program which it closely resembles which sells for $69 and many photographers also like to use for slideshows.

Thanks for checking it out.
Larry

Larry,

PD7 is superior in all, I made 720p MPEG2 and I am very happy with the output! PD7 is a indeed revolution in terms of slideshow, if you noticed my both slides, you must have felt grip, means you would love to see it again & again! It is very much soothing to our eyes. And everybody loves to see their pictures in motion with some innovative effect and with background some music!

Full marks to CyberLink team for this innovative slideshow features!

Kaushik

Thanks Ron. By the time I read this post I had deleted the trial of Edius fro my system. The user interface is extremely well done, but my prior complaints still stand.

For whatever it is worth, I took mixed HD content from 3 of my HD cameras, HDV from an HV-20, AVCHD from an HF100, and MJPEG from my tiny Canon TX-1 and mixed all three on the same timeline of Nero Vision. Despite the fact that all 3 are of different resolutions (1920, 1440, 1280 by 720 for the MJPEG) they were beautifully preserved in the final AVCHD disk. Yes, they did require transcoding, but the fact that this little gem did the job at all blew me away!

Larry

This does not portend good things for AVCHD users in Vegas 9 Pro, whenever it will be released. Sony has ALWAYS been slow to provide the tools needed, and left me and my new FX-1 with no Sony software tools literally for years after I bought it a few weeks after it was introduced in 2003. It is incredible how much hubris they demonstrate...

In fact, the very absence of pro tols is what started me on the path of Ulead, Cyberlink, etc., all of whom offered reasonable HDV solutions as well as AVCHD solutions long before Sony or the other "pro" programs.