Too much trouble before AVCHD editing

[o'pal]

Before buying HF100 I checked my PC's specifications and it looked OK, but now I realised that something's wrong. I can watch my video footage on a tv with no problems, but when it comes to PC it's completely different. I downloaded all updates. When I watch video on Image Mixer Player it looks not smooth, some sort of jumpy or blurry if on WMP . It gets even worse when I go to Image Mixer to do some simple editing of AVCHD files of size 1920x1080 or 1440x1080 - in editor screen my video looks like a bunch of still pictures which changes itself or when I moove a slider. Pinnacle Studio 12 does the same. I do not think that it is normal. I would not buy this camcorder if I new about this, it already took hours and hours of my time.
I spent £150 trying to solve this problem - I upgraded my Graphic card + power source to 500Mb ATI Radeon 3870, but it did not help. My PC is 1.5 years old Media Centre Edition Pentium4 3.2Ghz, 1GB RAM, Windows XP Professional service pack 3.
Now I guess that I need Quad processor + new motherboard and it is not known yet my new power source will be OK or something else. Any advice would be much appreciated.

[redsox_mark]

Graphics board generally doesn't help, it is CPU speed you need; and at least a core duo (or equiv.).

[koolpc]

CPU speed looks fine to me. Get another stick of ram. What hard drive have you got?

Mate has a pentium4, not a dual core and his looks great on the pc. He has 2g ram and a fast HD too.

[o'pal]

Originally Posted by koolpc

CPU speed looks fine to me. Get another stick of ram. What hard drive have you got?

It's 70GB with 45% free space.

[senu]

Originally Posted by koolpc

CPU speed looks fine to me. Get another stick of ram. What hard drive have you got?

Mate has a pentium4, not a dual core and his looks great on the pc. He has 2g ram and a fast HD too.

He is lucky
You do need a core2duo processor as a minimum . Quad core even better. 2Gb RAM is more than enough and you dont really need an "All singing dancing" graphics card although it could help overall system performance
Also the playback codec matters
Thee is Oxygen ( which I like but has been remove fromits website) PM if you want otry it
Nero Showtime 4, Power DVD ultra
WMP will usually not play AVCHD unless you have Core AVC Pro installed I do and I couldn't get it to work well
So I just stick to Nero Showtime and Oxygen
On my P4 3.0Ghz I can play HDV files easily, AVCHD files.. just about run.!

[stonfiesta5]

i convert my vids first using mp4cam2avi................it changes the file container without messing with the actual quality of the clips. avi seems a hell of a lot quicker to edit that the avchd files.

correct me if im wrong anyone. i think im right.......ish.

[redsox_mark]

I've not used that software (will try it), but it looks like you are right; it has options to just change the wrapper and not encode. That could help, as a transport stream adds additional overhead. The PC will still need to be fast to handle the AVCHD codec; but removing the transport stream stuff could help.

[senu]

Originally Posted by redsox_mark

I've not used that software (will try it), but it looks like you are right; it has options to just change the wrapper and not encode. That could help, as a transport stream adds additional overhead. The PC will still need to be fast to handle the AVCHD codec; but removing the transport stream stuff could help.

Sounds about right
I found that CapDVHS also removed the transport stream header from HDV m2t files back in the day when that was harder to edit and captured them as with the *.mpg suffix
I do think that getting a PC with as much grunt as you can i ( and software that doesn't bring the PC to its knees in use) is still the very easiest way to go

[s3marc]

download Nero 8 30 day trail and give that a go..... i found my laptop to be able to run avchd files fine using this

[koolpc]

Originally Posted by s3marc

download Nero 8 30 day trail and give that a go..... i found my laptop to be able to run avchd files fine using this

Thats what my mates uses.

[senu]

Originally Posted by koolpc

Thats what my mates uses.

That I have too on the P4 3.0Ghz ,

You can play AVCHD files with Nero Showtime 4 ( which I mentioned earlier)
and edit with Nero Vision 5 but your current PC will struggle
Im not sure if Neros trial version allows you access to these though

[o'pal]

Thank you guys, now I need to wait when my PC specialist (son) is available to do what you suggest. But I am certain that I am not the only one who has similar problems and your advice is really helpful.