Comments on: Tape vs. hard drive vs. card, and AVCHD

By: Teaching Online Journalism » AVCHD becoming less of a bear

Teaching Online Journalism » AVCHD becoming less of a bear — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 04:20:51 +0000

[...] fall I blogged about the choice between a MiniDV video camera and the new tapeless models (Tape vs. hard drive vs. card, and AVCHD). The AVCHD format poses some challenges if you are trying to work with older video editing [...]

By: Darren Shroeger

Darren Shroeger — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 18:22:45 +0000

On the Mac, I’ve heard that Toast 9 can covert AVCHD files to a more editable codec.

By: Curt Chandler

Curt Chandler — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 14:23:40 +0000

Just had an Ah Ha! moment. The Sony Vegas/Sound Forge editing suites all handle HD video natively in .m2t format. That’s why it actually takes LESS hard drive space to work in HD with the Vegas products than it does to work in standard def. I was working in Vegas a lot 12 months ago, recording live video directly to the hard drive in the studio. I couldn’t transfer .m2t files directly into Final Cut at the time and couldn’t figure out why Sony was so committed to the format. With the emergence of AVCHD video using hard drives and SD cards I now know the answer.

By: John Kondis

John Kondis — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 14:27:22 +0000

There is an inexpensive piece of software that you can download called Voltaic (http://mac.softpedia.com/get/Video/Voltaic.shtml) that will convert AVCHD to a Mac-friendly format, such as MOV. I received a good deal of AVCHD footage from a field photographer some months back and was not equipped at the time with the latest version of FCPro which included AVCHD support, so downloaded Voltaic and used the free trial to convert all of the video [3 hours worth] into HD 720p MOVs… Of course, editing the HD content will tax your machine if you don’t have a good combination of sufficient RAM, processor speed, and video card capability, but Voltaic does offer another method to deal with AVCHD files for those who are in a pinch…

By: Phil

Phil — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 00:47:01 +0000

I bought a Cannon HF100 recently. Records onto a SDHC card. One card 16GB holds over 2HRS in AVCHD. I have two differant Editing programs, Pinnacle Ultimate Plus 12 and Cyberlink Power Director 7. They are both pretty cool to use. It took me a bit to figure out what setting to use when importing my video to the program and then what setting to use when producing to disk. It has a setting called HDVD. Its High resolution DVD. It burns to a regular DVD and is 1080i resolution I believe. The format is some sort of MPEG2. The DVD when finished looks far better than standard video even when displayed on my 40 lcd 1080p tv. Optional idea if not wanting to always burn your media to Blu-ray yet keep your resolution for an HD TV. It letter boxes on a standard TV but on a HD TV fills the screen. New to AVCHD format but learning. It took me like 3.5 Hrs to render 20 minutes of video after editing. Then another 20 minutes or so to rip it too DVD. Oh ya make sure that your import video settings are compatible with the video format you intend to burn. Otherwise 3.5 hours are wasted when your rendered video will not rip to a DVD. Then your back to step one all over. LOL! Learning like I said.

By: John D

John D — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 22:32:36 +0000

As an outdoor enthusiast and technology addict, I have to agree that Tape (HDV, especially) will be around for many years to come, and in my opinion, is superior to any HDD camera. Hard drives do save you some time when transferring, but can limit you in the amount of footage you can take in the field. When I travel internationally, it is great to know that I am only limited by the number of DV tapes I have (or can buy). The 5 to 6 hours of recording on hard drive cameras can go pretty fast in your 2 week trip to africa. With DVs, I can simply pop in a new tape. Plus, I never have to worry about a hard drive breaking, say on the ride home. Hard drives are inherently going to fail. One of the best summaries on this topic I have found is on the website http://www.modernmom.org - the author points out that the compression rate to HDD (at least, for now) can never be as good as tape because a hard drive is limited to writing at 18mb/sec, where has tape is 25mb/sec.

Check out the review at: http://www.modernmom.org/main/Articles/Articles.html

John

By: paul redvers

paul redvers — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 07:12:57 +0000

what brand of tape is best for the canon hv20

By: Mindy

Mindy — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 08:34:01 +0000

Eventually it will surely become easier to work with AVCHD. But right now, it is giving a lot of people gray hairs!

By: OrcBal

OrcBal — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 23:04:09 +0000

Just got my HDR SR11 - the video captured, when played on a high-def TV looks good. But I was very surprised that getting the AVCHD into my Apple eMac is not easily done - I am still looking for a way.

By: Mindy

Mindy — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 12:28:22 +0000

@David K - I don’t know, but one of the reasons you buy a tapeless video camera is so you can simply copy the file over, and not spend the time doing what you have described.

If you’re going to do it the long way, you might as well buy a MiniDV camera, and not AVCHD.