[Howmanoid]

[quote name='dreyfus']
>

tallscot said:

> Importing the native file and editing the native file and then playing back the native file is much better than transcoding into anything.

This is true for a lot of scenarios, it is absolutely not true for AVCHD. AVCHD is by any standards a delivery format, not an editing format and absolutely every edit causes intensive internal decompression and buffering in the editing software. So, you always have a conversion - the difference is just: with Apple you have it in the beginning and then you can edit with good performance, even on a moderate machine (important for a large number of iMovie users, as it is a consumer product) - with "native" AVCHD editors "conversions" (mainly recovering intra-frame compression and buffering the intermediate data, then applying edits and re-compressing) take place on-the-fly, eating up considerable resources all the time.

Sony Vegas on the PC is doing "native" editing. Even on a 3.2GHz Quad with more RAM than the application can address, a 100% editing preview at full quality is barely possible and even the simplest edits take 5-8 times longer than editing an uncompressed format (with RAM full, massive file swapping and all cores running at max). Until computers triple or quadruple performance, generating an uncompressed editing format is the right thing, especially when there is a need to support less-than-actual hardware.

EXACTLY!!! Doing the work up-front is one of the things that allows iMove and FCP to allow you to scrub over footage that has had filters applied in real time without having to render everything first. If you've watched the guided tour of iMovie 09 you'll see this in the fact that it can offer up a panel of effects showing YOUR clips in real time. Come to think of it if folks watched that guided tour they'd see that it answers and even demos most of the questions that have been repeated over and over again in this thread.

[tallscot]

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You have to transcode it. AVCHD is a compressed format, as such not every frame contains all the data, only the delta from the previous and last key frame. If you're going to do things like pixel by pixel comparison to enable things like image stabilization you need all the pixels from every frame.

As I said, there are native editors on Windows.

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As far as taking a hit goes I imported ~30GB of footage from the camera. It didn't take much longer than it would to move 30GB of anything over USB2.

No, you are wrong. Read this article that illustrates my point very well:
http://37prime.wordp...d-and-mac-os-x/

It took 3 minutes to import a 58 second AVCHD clip on a MacBook Pro Core Duo with 2 gb RAM.

Sony Vegas, on Windows PCs, supports AVCHD natively, so there is no transcoding hit.

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Even the HD disc formats don't play back AVCHD natively. It's a derivative of the formats that they are based on.

Wrong again. Most BD players support AVCHD discs on BD and also DVDR, as does the PS3.

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That would be because AVCHD isn't a widely adopted standard in anything other than HD and AppleTV only support 720p max.

AVCHD isn't widely adopted by anything other than HD? Again, you state the obvious.

Wasn't last year the year of HD for Apple? They need to stop being behind the rest of the industry and be leading-edge again.

The fact that the Apple TV hardware only does 720p doesn't make my point any less legitimate. It only makes Apple look worse.

>The point being it's easier and faster.

How is it any easier? It's slower.

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720p.......... No cell processors......... no blood from a stone

Please, AVCHD can be played by the video chipsets in PCs. The Apple TV is just a giant rip-off right now.

[tallscot]

[quote name='dreyfus']
>

tallscot said:

> Importing the native file and editing the native file and then playing back the native file is much better than transcoding into anything.

This is true for a lot of scenarios, it is absolutely not true for AVCHD. AVCHD is by any standards a delivery format, not an editing format and absolutely every edit causes intensive internal decompression and buffering in the editing software. So, you always have a conversion - the difference is just: with Apple you have it in the beginning and then you can edit with good performance, even on a moderate machine (important for a large number of iMovie users, as it is a consumer product) - with "native" AVCHD editors "conversions" (mainly recovering intra-frame compression and buffering the intermediate data, then applying edits and re-compressing) take place on-the-fly, eating up considerable resources all the time.

Sony Vegas on the PC is doing "native" editing. Even on a 3.2GHz Quad with more RAM than the application can address, a 100% editing preview at full quality is barely possible and even the simplest edits take 5-8 times longer than editing an uncompressed format (with RAM full, massive file swapping and all cores running at max). Until computers triple or quadruple performance, generating an uncompressed editing format is the right thing, especially when there is a need to support less-than-actual hardware.

You are arguing why someone using Final Cut Pro would want to transcode, not a consumer who simply wants to watch their movies on their TV and do simple edits.

And your example of 5-8 times longer to do simple edits might be what you experienced, but I've seen the very basic Sony software that comes with their camcorders and I didn't see anything close to what you are describing. Reading the plethora of reviews for Vegas and Pinnacle and Ulead don't show this 5-8 times slower to do simple edits that you are describing either.

[Howmanoid]

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No, you are wrong. Read this article that illustrates my point very well:
http://37prime.wordp...d-and-mac-os-x/

It took 3 minutes to import a 58 second AVCHD clip on a MacBook Pro Core Duo with 2 gb RAM.

Not my experience. I edit video a lot. if it was that slow I've have ditched it. Have you actually imported any video into FCP?

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Sony Vegas, on Windows PCs, supports AVCHD natively, so there is no transcoding hit.

Not possible.

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> Even the HD disc formats don't play back AVCHD natively. It's a derivative of the formats that they are based on.

Wrong again. Most BD players support AVCHD discs on BD and also DVDR, as does the PS3.

How many AVCHD disks have you played on a BD player? Anyone?

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> That would be because AVCHD isn't a widely adopted standard in anything other than HD and AppleTV only support 720p max.

AVCHD isn't widely adopted by anything other than HD? Again, you state the obvious.

Isn't that the point? Why would Apple who have made a commitment to standards on AppleTV rush to support codecs that aren't a standard and aren't even in mass adoption?

Quote

>The point being it's easier and faster.

How is it any easier? It's slower.

No it's not slower. It speeds up the editing process and that's what takes most of the time and effort when dealing with video...


Care to share your real world experiences with us? I mean like what you've actually used and what you've done with it? Coz I'm not to only one on this thread telling you that native AVCHD editing is an oxymoron. You can't edit compressed video without first decompressing it. You do that up-front or you do it on the fly. If you do it on the fly then you take a kit in the user experience at edit time. Either way you take a hit.

[tallscot]

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Not my experience. I edit video a lot. if it was that slow I've have ditched it. Have you actually imported any video into FCP?

I'm sorry, but your argument that it doesn't "take much longer" to transcode AVCHD into AIC or ProRes is total hogwash and anyone with a tiny bit of video experience knows this. It takes quite a bit of time to transcode. You even argued that the extra time it takes is made up with faster editing. As I'll illustrate to you, that isn't the case anymore.

I gave you a link to an article that stated it took 3 minutes to import a 58 second AVCHD clip.

I just downloaded a sample AVCHD clip that is 31 seconds long an 61 megs in size. I mounted the .ISO disc image, fired up iMovie and it saw the movie clip and asked me if I wanted to import it. I imported it and it took 21 seconds to import the 31 second clip on my 8-core Mac Pro 2.66 Ghz with 10 gigs of RAM. How long did it take to copy that 61 meg movie clip over USB 2? It took 2 seconds.

So your argument that it doesn't take much longer is false.

>Not possible.

They don't transcode it. They import the native AVCHD files and edit them natively.

>How many AVCHD disks have you played on a BD player?

None, I'm on the Mac.

Again, you were wrong. You don't need to transcode AVCHD to play on Blu-ray players. It's just the directory structure is different.

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Isn't that the point? Why would Apple who have made a commitment to standards on AppleTV rush to support codecs that aren't a standard and aren't even in mass adoption?

You are forgetting that Apple does indeed support AVCHD with iMovie, they just don't support it natively.

They rushed to support HDV too.

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No it's not slower.

Importing is definitely much slower because of transcoding. Exporting is slower too because of transcoding.

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It speeds up the editing process

I said the AVCHD workflow is slower than DV. You said it's faster. How is it faster than editing in DV?

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Care to share your real world experiences with us?

Here's a complete review of three Windows editing packages that cost under $100 and edit native AVCHD:
http://www.cameratow...m/reviews/avchdvideosoftware/index.cfm

You can see how a 20 minute clip is imported in 1 minute. You can see where he edits AVCHD natively in real time.

As I said, the better AVCHD solution is on Windows right now.

[mvallance]

Dan,
Thank you for responding. You are correct and, in reflection, I apologise for being too strong in my postings. I am passionate about Mac and esp. iMovie and iLife as they make my teaching (and students' learning) so much more dynamic and creative. I thoroughly enjoy reading Macworld and your articles.So, let's agree to disagree about iMovie.
Regards,
mvallance
=

[bitrush]

Thank goodness for that.
Now, does anyone know about the iMovie '09 event saving functionality. Can we select where our project gets saved? And can we move the project to another machine?

[Dan Frakes]

mvallance said:

I thoroughly enjoy reading Macworld and your articles.So, let's agree to disagree about iMovie.

Sounds good to me ;) Thanks for the response.

[Dan Frakes]

bitrush said:

Now, does anyone know about the iMovie '09 event saving functionality. Can we select where our project gets saved? And can we move the project to another machine?

I didn't get a chance to testing out saving. I'm assuming that, as with iMovie '08, you can choose where a project is saved. No idea about the latter question. These will have to wait until we get our hands on the final product for our review.

[gatorade03]

Dan,

Do you know if iMovie '09 will continue to use the Single Field Processing that iMovie '08 uses? I believe that the Macworld Review of iMovie '08 called this feature out as the reason that DV output to a DVD yielded poor video quality. I'm very interested in the answer to that question as it is the sole decision point on whether or not I will purchase iLife '09.

Thanks,

Bryan

[Orytek]

Apple's half baked implementation of avchd support has me booting into Bootcamp and editing with Pinnacle 12, which supports it natively. A huge issue to me, and I won't go back to Final Cut or iPhoto until native support is added.
How anyone can defend Apple on this issue is beyond me. It is an insult to the editor enthusiast to be expected by Apple to accept their half ass avchd support.

So it is like Tailscot said in a previous post.
"They don't support native AVCHD, thus you have to transcode it twice from import to playback."

This is reason enough to not accept Apple's solution.

[AxSqrd]

iMovie '09 is what iMovie '08 should have been. They rewrote the GUI and got rid of all our favorite things like themes and effects. Now the bring them back and expect us to pay $80 for it? I don't think that Apple has pulled a good marketing scheme here.

[Dan Frakes]

gatorade03 said:

Dan,

Do you know if iMovie '09 will continue to use the Single Field Processing that iMovie '08 uses? I believe that the Macworld Review of iMovie '08 called this feature out as the reason that DV output to a DVD yielded poor video quality. I'm very interested in the answer to that question as it is the sole decision point on whether or not I will purchase iLife '09.

Good question; we'll check this out when we do the full review.

[wolfe]

I finished my first iM'09 Hollywood style movie. The program is somewhat feature filled (Precision Editor) without trying to be full featured (with a timeline) like a typical editor. It is creatively different (travel maps, audio, video stabilization) without offering different creativity (same old drag and drop, same old transitions). When finished, it is after all just a movie.



iMovie '09 doesn't import an AVI from my Casio Z750 digital camera. I had to import into Quicktime Pro along with the Casio Mac support file and export as MP4 to import into iMovie '09.



Which digital still/video cameras with MPEG-2 (standard definition), MPEG-4, AVCHD, or H.264, video in MPEG-1 (standard definition), MPEG-2 (standard definition), MPEG-4 (standard and high definition), H.264 (high definition) formats can import directly into iMovie '09? I'm ready to buy another one.