Does iMovie not support HD video?

[Need4Speed]

Originally posted by: Kaido]

Well, you CAN edit AVCHD, it's just very cumbersome. Hardly anyone I know does it. Even on 8-core rigs, it's VERY slow. It's just not practical to edit...it's a recording and playback format, not an editing format.

I think their marketing was...not very good for this format. They should include a tool like VoltaicHD for all platforms so that you can just convert to whatever, instead of having to buy something 😛

Yes, you're right .. it can be done .. but like you said it's incredibly difficult to edit or view single frames because AVCHD it's a GOP format (group of pictures) and heavily compressed .. ie the massive system resources needed to work with it as you pointed out.

It's much easier to transcode it to a useful format. I shouldn't have said it 'can't be edited', because it can .. it's just not practical for 95% (as you also stated) of the people out there. Certainly not for those shooting with consumer grade cams.

I think I just repeated everything you said 😉 ... Thanks for keeping me honest 🙂

 

[KeypoX]

re encoding sucks. And takes hours even days. I dont have a video camera but, if i were to buy one i would want one that records to mpeg, i think? So I dont have to re encode to burn to dvd.

Had to do this the other day for parents what a royal pain in the ass. Was done on a laptop too, so took extra long. I need to check their camera to see if the record format can be changed. They had set on HD and had over 30GB's of video.

 

[theblackbox]

when you transcode, you get much better colorspace to work with. i don't understand why anyone would want to work with raw avchd files, they aren't the best for editing.
if you pull the file structure off the card, the whole private folder, and then put them at root level of a drive, the mac will see the folder as the camera or an inserted card, you just can't use the avchd raw files though.
i'm not big on transcoding into aic, but it's free, so i guess it works.

just like windows relies on file structure to work properly, most NLEs like a good file structure and don't understand or deal with files outside of the structure, it doesn't have to do with it being a mac, even premiere can get wonky when dealing with just files.

 

[Shlong]

Since AVC HD isn't a good codec to edit with, what is a good intermediate codec to use for editing? I use sony vegas on a quad core (q6600 @ 3.1 ghz with 4GB ram), with AVC HD at times it can be sluggish. I know on mac's they use ProRes... what's a good one for Windows?

 

[MrX8503]

Final Cut Pro or Adobe Premiere CS4

Although these programs aren't free, but they handle everything. If you own the Adobe Master, the integration of Premiere, Encore, Media Encoder is pure awesomeness.