Is AVCHD lossy when editing?

[Tom Vaughan]

Most NLEs render the video on the timeline no matter what. Cyberlink has patented a process called Smart Video Rendering Technology, which avoids rendering and re-encoding video wherever possible. Of course, this is only possible when your target output video format matches your source video format. This was almost never the case with standard definition video. However, it is frequently the case with HD video. Both HDV and AVCHD contain Blu-ray legal video. Cyberlink's PowerDirector can do basic trimming of HDV or AVCHD clips, outputting to Blu-ray disc with minimal re-encoding. The only areas that require re-encoding are frames that were part of a Group of Pictures that was edited, or anywhere where transitions, effects or overlays were used. This is not only much higher quality than rendering and re-encoding, it's much faster.

Tom

[Perrone Ford]

Vegas has been doing that for years.

[Frank Brodkorb]

I don´t get all the fuzz, wranglig with highly compressed, lossy long GOP codecs.

Convert your files to uncompressed HD and you can edit in realtime on any half way decent PC and Premiere with a Black Magic card and a software raid.

Frank

[Perrone Ford]

Originally Posted by Frank Brodkorb

I don´t get all the fuzz, wranglig with highly compressed, lossy long GOP codecs.

Convert your files to uncompressed HD and you can edit in realtime on any half way decent PC and Premiere with a Black Magic card and a software raid.

Frank

Not unless you've got SERIOUS drives... It seems many people are editing with files on USB external drives. That is impossible with Uncompressed HD. Not that I am a proponent of using lossy editing codecs, but uncompressed HD is something of a dinosaur for editing anything but VFX. There are LOTS better solutions out there including both mathematically, and visually lossless codecs.

[Cris Hendrix]

Personally I just edit the uncompressed HD in Premiere Pro 2.0, I've found 2.0 a lot less resource hungry and quicker to work with than the newer versions, and with good encoders installed it seems up to any task

I couldn't imagine editing on anything less than a 7200 rpm drive with a fast connection, as cheap as hard drives are these days there's really no reason not to. Get a fast drive and dedicate it to nothing but video

[Perrone Ford]

Originally Posted by Cris Hendrix

I couldn't imagine editing on anything less than a 7200 rpm drive with a fast connection, as cheap as hard drives are these days there's really no reason not to. Get a fast drive and dedicate it to nothing but video

Well,

I tend to agree, but it depends on your project. When you shoot long form like I do, coming back and trying to edit uncompressed HD means I will be working with 5-10TB of data. Frankly, I'd rather not do that if I don't have to. My conference shoots are usually 2-3, 8 hour days. Even doing long form movies you can be looking at digitizing 10-30 hours worth of footage to cut down.

It's very different game than editing a 2 hour soccer game, or 2 hours of footage to get to a 3 minute web video.

[Frank Brodkorb]

Originally Posted by Perrone Ford

My conference shoots are usually 2-3, 8 hour days. Even doing long form movies you can be looking at digitizing 10-30 hours worth of footage to cut down.

Agree. I do 2 hrs program max. So a set of 4 software striped 1 tb disks is fine and uncompressed is so butter smooth in the timeline because it is so processor friendly.

If I had longer material I would go Cineform.
But recording in a long gop low color codec is a no-go for me.
But I´m anal with color and bit depth - not much guys care about that and prefer the ease of using SD cards and don´t mid the wrangling with AVCHD on the timeline.

Just not my cup of tea, but to each his own.

Frank

[Perrone Ford]

Originally Posted by Frank Brodkorb

Agree. I do 2 hrs program max. So a set of 4 software striped 1 tb disks is fine and uncompressed is so butter smooth in the timeline because it is so processor friendly.

If I had longer material I would go Cineform.
But recording in a long gop low color codec is a no-go for me.
But I´m anal with color and bit depth - not much guys care about that and prefer the ease of using SD cards and don´t mid the wrangling with AVCHD on the timeline.

Just not my cup of tea, but to each his own.

Frank

I use DNxHD on the timeline. 10bit non-lossy. VERY close to uncompressed in quality, at 1/6 the size. If I have to leave the NLE to do work, I use Lagarith compressed .avi files instead of the uncompressed files I used to do. It's absolutely lossless, fairly easy on modern CPUs, and creates files much smaller than uncompressed.

I get what you're saying, but I just don't feel uncompressed is nearly as important as it used to be for modern editing.

[Jeff Kellam]

Peronne:

From your comments, it dosen't sound like you are shooting in AVCHD. Do you use an AVCHD camera?

On a long form documentary style shoot, you could shoot in a lower AVCHD bitrate like 6 or 13 Mbps to save space and a native edit is super fast, just like DV. 24 hours of footage in 6Mbps AVCHD is 64 GB and the quality is great.

As others have said, computer hardware is very inexpensive in relation to camera costs. With an inexpensive CPU upgrade anyone can edit AVCHD natively, and the NLEs are handling it better with every iteration. It really is just personal preference. I am for maximum speed and minimal storage space, and native editing of AVCHD has worked very well for me since October 2008 when I started shooting with the HMC-150.