Editing AVCHD Files

[dicksibo]

I’m about to upgrade from my std def camcorder to a Panasonic HDC-HS100 HD camcorder and have been reading about the potential issues with editing the AVCHD files it generates.

I’m currently using Pinnacle 12 Ultimate with an AMD 64 x 2 Dual Core processor, 2G of RAM and a 512MB on the graphics card, OS is XP sp3.

Any thoughts/comments/experience from existing users would be appreciated as to whether this will be sufficient to handle AVCHD file editing or do I need to consider adding more “umph” in my PC.

[senu]

Why not download some AVCHD files and try them

[moriartygm]

Hello,

I have a PC with an Athlon 64 chip and 4GB of RAM.
I have set Sony Vegas to render 7 minutes of edit AVCHD footage back to AVCHD and it is reporting a render time of 56 minutes.

So 7 minutes of footage, 56 minutes of render time. That really hurts, perhaps I also need a faster PC, this is really painfully slow.

I wanted to do all of this on my iMac, but having tried all sorts of things (iMovie, Final Cut Express) there is no Mac software for editing AVCHD without transcoding to AIC, which introduces it's own problems that makes the files degrade too much.

I would expect similar performance from your machine. So, for rendering multiply the length of the movie by 5.

If you are just downloading to view without any edits, it's much quicker, just copy the files from the camcorder to the hard drive. No problem.

[senu]

Originally Posted by moriartygm

Hello,

I have a PC with an Athlon 64 chip and 4GB of RAM.
I have set Sony Vegas to render 7 minutes of edit AVCHD footage back to AVCHD and it is reporting a render time of 56 minutes.

So 7 minutes of footage, 56 minutes of render time. That really hurts, perhaps I also need a faster PC, this is really painfully slow

You do . I have a Quad core (9470) with 4GBb ram .. itis fast but Im told an i7 system wlll leave it on the starting blocks.. AVCHD..!

I would expect similar performance from your machine. So, for rendering multiply the length of the movie by 5.

Hi is dual core though, should make a difference

If you are just downloading to view without any edits, it's much quicker, just copy the files from the camcorder to the hard drive. No problem.

There is a suggestion to convert them to HDV edit , then revert back to AVCHD

[dicksibo]

Many thanks to all who replied, it has been helpful. It looks like my next project will be building a new PC, I've been looking at the i7 CPU, although up to now I've been an AMD user. Oh well at least the family will get my current one:-)