Hi everybody,

Been lurking for a while, now I turn to you for help.

My name is Chris, I'm a journalist from Brazil that has been working for the past 3 years as a PR agent in the IT and Biotech branch. Now I got sick of it and am taking the plunge into video journalism/PR.
Last April I traveled to NY, where I bought my NX5U, MacBook and FCP. Then I did the classic trip from NY to SF where I attended DV Workshop's 6 day Documentary & Video Journalist Workshop.

I'm still unsure about the workflow. I edited my first piece using FCP, but the G-Drive 7200RPM external Disk I got bit the dust right after the first use, now while I wait for it to be repaired, I'm working on Premiere CS4. I have to say I feel very comfortable, since I've been working with Premiere on and off for the past 4 years.

A few years back I build a PC (specs bellow) that was lightning fast while editing SD footage, but now with the HD footage acquired via the Sony software (M2TS file), playback during editing is a bit sluggish, rendering takes considerably more time, as does encoding (1/2 hour for encoding a 2 minute clip and 3 hours !!! for an 8 minute clip in F4V).

Yesterday I installed Cineform NeoScene, but it is not working, Premiere crashes when using media encoder and the Cineform codec, and the standalone app gives me a "Cannot find Common files" error. (Will write to the Cineform support about it)

I was reading a tread about using Prores proxy settings for editing AVCHD footage in FCP, that might be an answer. Does anybody have any other suggestion regarding the workflow (format for editing)? Bear in mind I'm still unsure if I'm sticking with Premiere or FCP.

Video News Release edited with Premiere CS4: YouTube - ‪Promo Dandara no Teatro CIEE - 06/08/2010‬‎ (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfMxbJ99y3Y)

I'm pretty happy with the quality of the end result. What I'm afraid of it that it looks like I'm going to have some trouble doing multiple cam edits.

I understand that I ask a fairly complex question, I posted it here because people dealing with this camera may have had the same questions.

I appreciate any input, and am happy to provide more info. Thanks in advance!

Chris


PC Specs:
Win XP 32bits
Quad Core CPU 6600
3GB RAM
4 7200RPM disks in raid 0 - 2 for the system(C:/) and 2 for the projects(D:/), plus 1 7200RPM removable disk connected via Sata for backup.
Premiere CS4

Mac Specs
MacBook Pro
2.4GHz Intel Core i5
4GB (2x2GB) RAM
500GB 5200rpm Hard Drive
nVIDIA GeForce GT 330M 256MB Graphics
FCP 7

Hi Chris,
I can only give you input on a PC. I use Edius Pro5.5 which will edit one stream native on my Q9450 Quad core. With an i7 processor Edius will edit several tracks native. I normally do multicam with NX5U, SR11 and XR500 I encode two of the files to Canopus HQ and leave one native for multicam editing in Edius. I tried Cineform which worked OK but not as good as Canopus for me.

Ron Evans

Premiere CS4 or not, you definitely have to add more RAM to your PC, especially if you want multicamera editing. With just 3 Gigabytes of memory, you probably feel staggering performance of your PC simply playing back AVCHD footage. You should expand the PC memory to at least 4 GB (but 6 GB is recommended).

The problem, however, is that there are limits on memory and address space for each supported release of Windows. Thus, user-mode virtual address space for each 32-bit process in 32-bit Windows XP is only 3 GB. This means that even if you installed additional physical memory, your operating system – 32-bit Windows XP – would not be able to use it.

Therefore, you need to upgrade your operating system to 64-bit Windows 7 (Professional or Ultimate), which will give you 4 GB address space for any 32-bit application and up to eight TB for 64-bit software.

Sorry Chris, but I cannot see any cheap solution for your problem.

FCP with an offline using ProRes Proxy works fine for me, it does take time to transcode but if you can allow for it you can get away with a file that doesn't take up too much space (compared to ProRes 422) and plays back fine on a Mac, probably even in multicam but I have to admit I haven't tried that yet.

I agree that you need much more horsepower to edit AVCHD in PPCS4. The editing workstation I use is home built and has i7 930 and 12 GB RAM and the OS was 64 bit, initially vista, now Win7. Admittedly, this is a bit of overkill, but runs flawlessly editing the AVCHD. You might want to stop by the Adobe Premiere forum (Adobe Forums: Forum: Premiere Pro CS5 (http://forums.adobe.com/community/premiere/premierepro_current)) as this topic has been discussed at length with lots of info about the type of system you need to get this software/video format combo to work successfully.