4 replies to this topic

[donga]

I hear alot of guys talking about using their cards instead of their hard drives on their cameras? I would have thought using the hard drive would be better for alot of reasons?

[wagsy]

Hi Donga
A card would be safer than a delicate fast spinning hard drive.
Look at how many of the first hard drive ipods have failed.

Hard drives or cards, most consumer camera's compress the footage to the AVCHD codec which is super hard to edit with.
Yeh you can do it with Vegas but you soon get sick of editing at a very low draft setting.
So you have to convert it to something that's easier to edit.
So no time saved with AVCHD compared to just sucking it in off a video tape in the first place.
Then you have to save the footage to something for safe keeping.

What camera has both that you are you thinking of?

[donga]

I have a new canon FH 10 which has both. What do you mean "consumer cameras"? Do you guys still prefer to work with tape?

And what do you mean get sick of editing on a low draught setting? Doesnt the capability of the computer determine the speed of editing and why is everyone raving about the latest digital hd cameras and how crystal clear they are?

cant the AVCHD files be converted and then they are ok? Why is hd video hard to edit with?

Sorry for all the questions.

[wagsy]

Hi Donga
A FH 10 or is it a HF10?
It uses Flash Memory, has no mechanical hard drive.

There is Consumer, Prosumer and Pro.
Most little consumer camcorders used the AVCHD codec which means even on a fast computer or laptop you cannot edit it in real-time.
So you convert the files to something easier to edit which is about 1.1 speed. ie 60 minutes of AVCHD footage takes 60minutes to convert.
You save no time by having a tape less AVCHD camera.
17mbps AVCHD (H.264) is just a super compressed format making it hard to edit, they use it to get the HD footage into the smallest size.
The DSLR Canon D5 uses H.264 @ 40mbps.

If you use a HDV camera (prosumer) like the EX1 or EX3, it uses 25-35mbps MPEG2 which most new computers can edit no worries without having to convert it.

A full pro HD camera runs around 130mbps, so you can see these little cameras are compressing the footage down quite abit

[donga]

Whoops, HF 10, yeah a little consumer camera but its still hd so good for me. No hard drive? hmmm, what was that guy on about then when he said it used card and a hard drive bank for storing film?

Not to concerned about the time to convert as long as I can avoid loading the software that came with it. I want to be able to just go with the raw avchd footage but need to retrieve it with my Corel studio.

On another site I followed the link to Huffyuv which seems to be what I need - a lossless converter. I notice it doesnt have Vista as one of the system requirements? Is it Vista compatible or is there a newer version for this.

How does it adapt to my current Windows Media Encoder which is useless and will not recognise my clips either?

Edited by donga, 07 September 2009 - 04:23 PM.