Converting AVCHD to XDCAM EX
by Michael McSwain
on
Sep 2, 2009 at 2:39:02 am
Here's my dilemma:
I work in corporate video and we just bought an EX3 and an HMC150 for a travel camera. HMC is not a bad little camera but 3 of our editing stations are G5's and will not play nice with AVCHD. I've found that you can encode avchd to xdcam ex via toast but it's painfully slow and it ties up an edit station. We have an 8 core windows server that I could utilize for this task if I could find the right encoding software. Only reason i'm leaning towards encoding to xdcam is the file sizes are significantly smaller than ProRes, AIC or DVCPRO HD and it would match the rest of our footage. Any ideas?
Re: Converting AVCHD to XDCAM EX by Michael McSwain on Sep 3, 2009 at 2:11:34 pm
Can't say I'm the most up to date guru on codecs.
Our other camera is an EX3. Between the smaller file sizes and the would be matching formats it seems like a somewhat logical choice. Is ProRes going to look that much better? This is sort of our secondary travel cam. Mostly used for web marketing type videos and such.
Re: Converting AVCHD to XDCAM EX by Guy McLoughlin on Sep 4, 2009 at 7:43:29 pm
I think you could do this using Sony Vegas Pro 9.
Just drop your HMC150 AVCHD video on to the Vegas timeline, doubleclick to select the entire clip and render to Sony HD EX ( .MXF ) format.
Sony seems to have optimized Vegas for their HD EX format, so the render is very quick and the finished file appears identical to the AVCHD original file.
NOTE: Make sure you set the "Pixel Format" to 32-bit "Full Range" before rendering your new video. ( FILE : PROPERTIES : PIXEL FORMAT )
You can download a free trial of Sony Vegas Pro 9 from here:
Re: Converting AVCHD to XDCAM EX by Gerry Lawson on Sep 29, 2009 at 8:21:29 pm
I've found that Canopus Edius Pro does a good (easy) job of transcoding MTS files on Windows machines. I think they an XDCAM droplet that allows you to just drop the MTS files onto the droplet icon and it automatically starts the transcodes. I've used this workflow to transcode to Canopus' High Quality proprietary codec and it worked very well. I haven't been editing very long but I love Edius for it's ease of use.
One thing to note is that Canopus encoders may be the best at utilizing multicore CPUs.
Another thing to note is that I tried transcoding MTS files with Canopus' Procoder app (which I love) and it had severe chroma problems in the encoded files. I don't remember which version I was using though.
