Re: entering HD world: doubts

FCP does require many acquisition formats to be "re-wrapped" to a traditional QuickTime file.

The camcorder you're referring to looks like it uses those picture dimensions to note how many sensor pixels are active...not how many pixels are in the recorded image. HDV is 1440x1080, non-square pixels (to make a 16:9 image)

AVCHD is a more compressed data file, but is full res (1920x1080) and I would say the image quality is reasonably similar to HDV. For editing, HDV was the big format for a computer processor to tackle when it came out as it takes a lot of muscle to encode, which is what's happening when you're editing HDV material and previewing the timeline natively for instance. Now, today's computer processors are up to the task, but AVCHD works better on larger processors as it takes even more calculations than HDV MPEG2 as AVCHD's MPEG4 has some vector calculations and motion estimation involved.

I don't know what needs to be done to AVCHD to edit it in FCP. Adobe has native project presets for it.






TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,