Recommend an AVCHD editing app please
 

Mate needs a simple edit app - for a newbie to film-making. Premiere Elements, Studio 12 Plus, Magix pro 15 or something else? Some of the trial apps won't touch AVCHD, so my friend can't try and compare.
PC is an i7 rig. Any suggestions from experience.

William,
I never touched AVCHD, but it seems that Premiere Elements 7 does support
native AVCHD editing
(you can get Premiere Elements 7 AND Photoshop Elements 7
for around $100: basically, a steal).
Just keep in mind that AVCHD is highly compressed and
needs (from what I've read) a lot of processor power.
If not happy because of sluggish performance,
you can always check out Cineform NeoScene
and use it with Premiere Elements
(http://www.cineform.com/neoscene/index.php)
Hope this helps

Best

Vasco

Sony's Vegas Movie Studio also supports native AVCHD editing.

William,

It's been my experience (and others) that AVCHD is not an acceptable editing format even on powerful computers. It may play back fine but once you try and manipulate the footage on the timeline it responds too slow to be edited. I convert everything to cineform before editing. I'm using Vegas 9 (64bit) on a 2.4 ghz quad core with 8 gigs of ram.

Regards, Marc

I would go with Vegas Movie Studio.

Wow -- that certainly hasn't been my experience. I edit AVCHD on Premiere Pro CS4 on a 2.6 GHz quad core, overclocked to 3.0 GHz, with 8 gigs of RAM. Editing on the time line is smooth as silk and faster than editing SD on my old 3.2 GHz P4. I don't know about other software, but Premiere off-loads a lot of processing to the graphics card. I don't have anything particularly flashy, but it made a huge difference over the old one I used to use.

It appears that Vegas Movie Studio 9 is the way to go. I heard that it only supports the creation of a certain type of blu-ray disk though. Anyone any info on this? The rig has an LG blu-ray writer doing DVD±RW Blu-ray.

What mainboard does your rig have, and you overclock, one of the few it seems will overclock in movie editing. I take it you don't have edit horrors on your machine.

Oh, heck -- ignore what I said (that's what I get for posting before coffee). I'm editing, primarily, HDV. I've edited a little bit of AVCHD, but it's out of one of those FLIP pocket cams which is 720p and, I think, a relatively low band width. I've had no problems with it, either, but I don't think it's really representative of AVCHD editing on my system.

I was asking about your overclocked rig and what mobo is in it. Just asking because mine was running (Q6600 2.4ghz) at 3ghz until people suggested I should never never overclock an editing rig - stability and heat gremlins ...?

Ah, sorry, I misunderstood.

The CPU is a Q9400 2.66 GHz.
The m/b is an Asus P5E.

The m/b comes with a handy over-clocking utility that reports m/b and cpu temps. I found that pushing the cpu to 3.0 GHz results in a noticeable heat increase, but does not push the chip into the danger zone, even on a long render. I imagine I'm shortening the cpu life, but by the time it gives out (if it does), I'll be ready for a new machine anyway. Virtually all Intel cpus are good for overclocking up to about 10% without any major concerns. I had problems with P4s if I overclocked more than that AND ran a long render, i.e. overnight. The P4s had puny fans, however, whereas this quad-core has a much larger one and the case that it is in is designed to vent the CPU exhaust directly outside the case.

Paul,

Glad to hear it. I'll have to give Premiere CS4 a test drive and see how it does on my system. I've been using Vegas mostly.

Marc

I suggest giving Edius Neo 2 a try (and the trial version is fully functional for 30 days). You can drop AVCHD footage on the timeline, but for most editing purposes it is better to convert AVCHD footage to an intermediate codec (with any NLE). Neo 2 comes with Canopus HQ (a decent alternative to Cineform) and a neat little tool that makes it very easy to convert AVCHD footage to Canopus HQ. For the price, Neo 2 is tough to beat for basic editing.

Since his machine is Core i7 based, it's likely he could choose pretty much any NLE especially if he has a graphics card with at least 512MB on board. After the initial run of Core i7 offerings from Dell I haven't seen anything with less.

Since he is described as a comparative "newbie" to film making I recommend Pinnacle Studio 12 Plus or Ultimate as it is very intuitive and user friendly in addition to being an all in one from capture/import to edit to output to disk or file (including Blu-ray disk if his system has a burner.

Pinnacle Studio was one of the first NLE's to support native editing of AVCHD for those with enough processing power and the Core i7 has it.

Not all NLEs use the GPU. Sadly Vegas doesn't. My poor 1.5GB graphics card sits there like the Maytag man when I'm in Vegas! Fortunately, my other apps can take advantage of it.


This is somewhat debatable. AVCHD is kicking everyone's butt right now. But beside that, it's a pretty poor editing choice regardless. Editing long-GOP codecs just doesn't make good sense unless you are in a MASSIVE hurry or doing the most basic of edits. Even trying to do decent color grading on these 8-bit codecs just overwhelms them.

I've been editing AVCHD on PPro CS4, and while it lags at times, it still relatively smooth, and best of all you can keep it in its native format and save time and hard drive space.