9 April 2008 6 Comments

AVCHD support in Final Cut Pro

Ok I know that talking about the AVCHD codec isn’t really talking about professional grade video and I’m probably only one of a few guys that are really bugged by this.  But anyway… Here it is.

Let me first start off and say I think its great that Final Cut Studio 2 supports the AVCHD codec and I’m so glad that they integrated the ability to use cameras that use that codec with Final Cut.  However my problem is that Final Cut actually transcodes the h.264 based codec of AVCHD to Apple ProRes 422.  This is great in one way because ovbiously Final Cut deals with ProRes 422 natively, so this way you can easily bring your clips in and edit them in real-time do everything you want to do. But the downside is that ProRes 422 is about 4 times the size of the original AVCHD video files.  So for example, a 2-minute native AVCHD file is about 200 MB. After transcoding to the Apple ProRes 422 codec, the file size can be as large as 2 GB.

Ok so that’s my rant for today.  When your shooting on your consumer grade HD camera you can get lots of footage on that 8GB flash drive.  But watch out when you start to ingest that stuff into Final Cut.  Your gonna need lots of space.

Basically my workaround for this is to export my final video as an h.264 MOV or MP4.  Quality will be good and you’ll save on file size. If your trying to basically keep everything you recorded onto a SD card or something.  Just copy the entire contents of the card to a folder on your drive.  Then you can keep it for later when you want to pull clips into FCP.  Another great app to check out for fast H.264 encoding is Visualhub.  But I’ll save going over all the deatils on that app for another day.

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6 Responses to “AVCHD support in Final Cut Pro”

  1. adam 16 June 2008 at 10:25 am #

    Quote from http://www.avsforum.com :
    AVCHD is a highly efficient, but highly compressed codec, so one’s computer has got to do a lot of processing on both the video card and CPU fronts to play back the video streams.

    I think you’ll find that any software on any platform that doesn’t work in native AVCHD format will also give you very large files.

  2. Dave Clark 17 June 2008 at 9:21 am #

    Yeah I definitely agree. I just wish FCP would make it as a native codec. Hopefully in the future they will. Of if there was just another 3rd party app that let you pull in the video files as native for storage. That would be great too.

    Thanks Adam.

  3. Michael 2 November 2009 at 8:05 am #

    I agree with all. In my experience, converting the AVCHD files to Prores is worth the extra drive requirements simply because it makes for far much smoother RT editing in FCP.

  4. Sam 26 March 2010 at 5:37 pm #

    Yo did you guys know that you can edit avchd natively in premiere CS4? It’s true!

    Just drag it right into your bin, drag it right into your timeline and BAM! start cuttin it up.

    hopefully FCP will follow suit soon!!!!!

  5. CHRIS 13 July 2010 at 5:10 pm #

    Hey there,

    I’m having troubles exporting my finished AVCHD project from FCP. Motion issues are my main concern. Although motion is very smooth when played from the FCP timeline, when the exported QT movie is played back through Quick Time Player the motion effects are stuttering. I’ve tried exporting to apple pro res 422, 4444, AVI, and MP4.

    What format would you recommend exporting to in order to maintain the smooth motion of slow mo?

    Thanks


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