AVCHD FCP 6.02 G5 workflow?

Hi all:

I will be purchasing a Canon Vixia HF10 or 11 for an upcoming project. The project requires the smallest possible, least intrusive camera and from what I have heard from friends who own them and from other posters on the Net, the little Canons are pretty cool. Small, light, cheap and decent quality.

My question is, how do you deal with AVCHD footage from SDHC cards with FCP? I mostly shoot P2 so I am totally familiar with the P2 workflow. What I am not familiar with are ProRes 422 and ingesting and dealing with AVCHD video.

1. I have a dual 2.3Ghz G5 PPC. 4GB Ram, FCP 6.02, Aja Kona 3, 8 drive 4TB Sata RAID.
2. How do you ingest AVCHD footage? Is it through log and transfer like P2?
3. What does FCP bring the AVCHD footage in as? Converts it to Pro Res 422 automatically? Or do you have to bring it in a Apple Intermediate Codec or can I/should I bring it in as DVCProHD codec?
4. Will my antique dual 2.3Ghz handle straight editing (NOT capturing obviously because it is from card) with ProRes 422 okay?

There will be no compositing, layering or anything fancy with the AVCHD footage, straight cuts and dissolves, but we do want to have the ability to output a quality HDCAM SR or D5 master for broadcast delivery. The Canon will shoot AVCHD 1920 x 1080, probably mostly shot in their version of 24p and 30p, which I believe is embedded in a 1080 60i stream.

If anyone has experience in dealing with AVCHD with an older G5 and outputting broadcast masters, please post your experience and what you know about the questions listed above.

Thanks,

Dan

I think Shane has had more experience working with AVCHD, but since the Internet is all about spewing poorly informed opinions, here's my two cents: Don't.

I shot a short-short on an AVCHD camera recently, and the workflow was abysmal. I'd recommend picking up an HV30 instead. It's roughly the same price, and has a well-defined workflow.

Hi Jeff:

Really? Everything I have read touts the superiority of the AVCHD codec as the next and better generation of HDV, H.264 versus MPEG2? Hmm, seems like some tests may be in order. Small size is very important to the shoot I am doing, isn't the HV30 considerably larger because of the tape drive?

I guess the only way to know which way is best is to borrow both and do a little shootout. Most of the user reports say that the HF11 is superior under lousy lighting conditions, which I will definitely be dealing with on this project.

Thanks for the advice.

I dunno about "considerably." To me, anything under ten pounds is pretty damn tiny.

I did spend a second googling around, and you're out of luck. According to what I read, AVCHD is not supported on PowerPC systems.

AVCHD is superior to HDV...but a lot. HDV relies on older MPEG-2 compression, and AVCHD is newer MEPG-4 compression. Both are Long GOP formats, but in side-by-side comparisons I have seen (granted, by a Panasonic rep) the AVCHD footage was MUCH sharper and more colorful.

HDV is native in FCP, while AVCHD needs to be converted. Convert to ProREs...unfortunate that it will eat up a LOT of space.

But I answered this main question on the Cow.


www.shanerosseditor.com

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Not to fly off the rails here, but I'm instantly suspicious of any format comparison that begs the conclusion that one sample is more saturated than the other. In a lot of cases, I've seen footage that actually came out of the camera too saturated, clipping the shadows badly. Sure, it looks good on the monitor at first glance, but you don't have the latitude you'd have with nicely flat footage.

Just my personal pet peeve about lower-end gear.

Well, you are talking shooting for a colorist...which is a good thing to go. And yeah, the lower end gear is "geared" (pardon the pun) towards consumers who want a nice bright saturated image. BUT, there are professional AVCHD cameras out there that shoot in that flat way that you like. The HMC-150 for example.

And I am sure that the footage was tweaked for the demo. But I have had a chance to play with AVCHD footage from the HMC-150 and it looks tons better than the HDV footage I have to play with (that I shot).

Still...I'd opt for the newer MPEG-4 technology. And the HV30? Rolling CMOS shutter dude. The AVCHD cameras from panasonic are all 3 CCD...avoids that crud.


www.shanerosseditor.com

Listen to THE EDIT BAY Podcast on iTunes
[itunes.apple.com]

The word "AVC" and "PPC" don't really go very well together in my vocabulary. Personally, for the ease of workflow/storage, i'd rather take HDV over AVCHD, even though AVC offers superior compression technology, even on an Intel.

With HDV/XDCAM/XDCAM EX, I'll likely be staying native during the edit and render/MM out to ProRes for the grade/conform.

With AVCHD (also considering the fact that it's lower end acquisition gear, likely tighter production budgets), you're talking about fairly large amounts of storage in proportion to the budget (around 4 times the storage compared to HDV AND you're tapeless, so you need redundancy). You have a 3.75 MB/s format, you need a 14-20 MB/s storage for the QT rushes for editing, plus at least a FW800 drive to sustain the data rate. It's not proportionate. Also, I don't think you can even use the offline/online workflow with L&T.

So yea, I'm with Jeff on this one. I'd go on HDV over AVCHD due to the workflow.



www.strypesinpost.com

I got a SONY UX20 Handycam and VRD-MC5 DVDDirect burner this week.

I am looking forward to not using tape for the simple stuff that I do.

I shot some video to the SD memory, and then connected the cam to the burner and made a Video=>DVD.

How do I get that DVD video into my iMac 20 OSX? So I can edit with FCP?

I put the finished DVD into my DVD drive and get files ending in .bdmv and .m2ts .

None of the apps open the files, including my beloved MPEG StreamClip.

Did I make the DVD correct(ly)?

What I've been doing up to now for flow is:

Tape > DVD Burner

DVD disc as VIDEO_TS > dvdxdv > Quicktime .mov > FCP

I am excited about not using tape!

THANKS

Independent photographer, film maker and Producer. In the wonderful UK.