Preprocessing AVCHD Media for Editing

GeniusDV

When it comes to video editing, there are some important decisions to be made before ingesting media. You may find that you will save time in pre-processing your media ahead of time. This is especially true if your camera shoots in an AVCHD format, or similar equivelant.

Seasoned video editors will agree that this workflow applies to most video editing systems including; Avid Media Composer, Adobe Premiere, or Final Cut Pro. However, there are some exceptions to this theory, because transcoding your media ahead of time, does require extra time.

What is AVCHD?
AVCHD is a popular video container that contains highly compressed media. The quality of AVCHD is surprisingly good when you consider the amount of compression used.

AVCHD has become very popular amongst consumers / prosumers because of its high quality video image and small file size. Only problem is, it's very difficult to edit with.

Since AVCHD is a highly compressed format, it requires extra processing power if you want to edit the media. Therefore you may need to convert (transcode) your AVCHD media to a different format that provide full frame compression. This will make the media much easier to edit with. read more...