how to edit C100 AVCHD footage in Avid on PC

[Richard Gooderick]

I would be grateful to hear from anyone who has been successful in editing the C100 AVCHD footage with Avid Media Composer.
I have had the camera for a few months but have only used it for shooting. I have not edited the footage myself.
Now that I am thinking of doing some serious editing I note that where I thought I had been successful in importing footage into Avid that it does in fact seem to have been downscaled to a low resolution.
From reading the (deeply technical) posts on the Avid forums it appears that this is what Avid does.
The footage needs to be converted into the Avid codec (DNxHD) but I have not been successful in finding any software that will do this for PC. On Mac yes, on PC no.
Any suggestions short of using an external recorder (I don't want the extra bulk)?
BTW before anyone says it, yes, I have considered changing to Premiere!

[Chris Medico]

If you have v5 or higher the workflow is:

AMA link the footage from the camera into Avid

Select the clips in the bin then right click and select "Consolidate/Transcode"

Select "Transcode" on the popup with the new media settings you like (at least DNxHD 145)

That will convert the AVCHD to DNxHD with the best conversion quality.

[Richard Gooderick]

Thanks Chris
That seems simple enough.
I am travelling out of the country until next Tuesday and will try it when I return.
Many thanks.

[Richard Gooderick]

I just tried this before I leave for the airport.
When I link to AMA I get an error message.
When I check this out in Console it tells me that the file is unsupported.
It seems to think it is Sony XDCam.

[Chris Medico]

You'll need to make sure you have the AMA plugin for AVCHD installed. It isn't installed by default.

Avid | Avid Media Access Plug-ins

[Chris Medico]

And..

Use "Link to Volume" and not "Link to Files". Linking to the volume is more robust. Important if you have to relink the files again in the future.

[Richard Gooderick]

I am running version 5.
The plug-in only works for version 6 onwards.
So I will need to decide whether to upgrade or buy something else.
Many thanks for your help.

[Chris Medico]

Ah.. With v5 you can import AVCHD but not AMA link to it. :(

If you have Squeeze you can use that to batch convert your files to DNxHD. If not FFMPEG is a free utility that does a great job as well. There is a bit of a learning curve with that one though.

[Richard Gooderick]

Thanks Chris.
That's enormously helpful.

[Pavel Sedlak]

I work with AVCHD C100 clips on Avid Symphony 6.5.2 (it is the same as Composer 6.5.2).

I have problem with red saturated color (looks jagged on edges after transcode to DNxHD), so I don't transcode to DNxHD Avid's codec but to XDCAM EX HQ codec (35Mbps VBR, 1920x1080), it's solve this problem (but only this one codec is ok). I think that it's the Canon's AVCHD (PsF) problem because I get the same result with AVCHD from G10 camera.

Look at this orig crop file (tiff):
http://www.videoproduce.cz/images/C1...150pct_02b.tif (DNxHD)
http://www.videoproduce.cz/images/C1..._150pct_01.tif (XDCAM HQ)