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.

Technorati Tags: AVCHD, Final Cut Studio 2, H.264, VisualHub