When shooting 720p the image has no artifacts, however, in 1080p there is an obscene amount. It is so bad that footage is unusable (luckily it was just a test). I have seen the same artifacts present in other footage under a variety of conditions. Has anybody been able to shoot 1080 with the HMC and produce an image devoid of a ridiculous amount of artifacts?

The plot thickens a little bit..I played back the footage in camera and it looks fine, no artifacts. So is something happening between the time footage is downloaded to computer and imported into NLE? The thing is I am not transcoding it into another format, just viewing it native through cs4.

It may be that the PC and CS4 just can't decode 1080 AVCHD without artifacts. 720P may be easier to decode.

Ron Evans

Are you using a Quad Core machine?

I found working with in 1080 a Quad Core PC is a must.

The plot thickens a little bit..I played back the footage in camera and it looks fine, no artifacts. So is something happening between the time footage is downloaded to computer and imported into NLE? The thing is I am not transcoding it into another format, just viewing it native through cs4.

What playback quality settings? I can almost guarantee that your computer is showing the video in a low quality so it may keep up.

I have yet to see footage from this camera in 720p on vimeo that does not have unacceptable amounts of artifacting. If you know of one, please post it here.

Blaming a camera like the HMC 150, which produces excellent 720p raw footage, for artifacts seen in (hugely-compressed) streaming video is .... probably not right.

Edit: I reminded myself that Vimeo for a week provides submitted files for download ... so the extra compression applied by Vimeo may or may not be a factor here, depending on what was being viewed.

Try transcoding your AVCHD video with the trial version of Cineform's NEO SCENE CODEC. NEO SCENE does a great job with my HMC150 clips.

Cineform Neoscene (http://www.cineform.com/neoscene/)

Can you describe the artifacts more? I'm not seeing artifacts in 1080p, importing and editing with FCP 7.

I do see a little more noise from time to time, and considering that 1080p and 720p have to fit in the same AVCHD bandwidth, 720p is likely to hold up better when there is a lot of movement.