12 Replies Latest reply: Jul 5, 2010 1:28 PM by Christopher Duncan RSS

    CS4: AVCHD performance

    Christopher Duncan Community Member

      Hey, guys.

       

      I'm looking to overcome some performance problems with playback and I suspect many of you have already fought these battles. I'm running a reasonably decent box - 32 bit Vista, 3 gigs of memory, dedicated SATA hard drive for data, dual core 2.4 ghz AMD processor, NVidia card with 512megs onboard memory. I'm working primarily with footage from a Panasonic AG-HMC70P, which shoots exclusively in AVCHD, and that's where the trouble begins.

       

      If I have a simple, one video track playback of an mts file, it plays fine. Adding even a couple of additional video tracks, however, causes the output to freeze for spells or play back in a jerky manner, even with playback quality set to draft or automatic. The CPU gets slammed, as one might expect.

       

      I've done a fair amount of research on optimizing the PC itself, but in the end I think for any non trivial project AVCHD is just more load than the mules can pull. And honestly, it's more load than I really need. I know that AVCHD is a demanding high def format, and in truth I could live with SD for most projects as they end up going to standard DVD, the web, or Windows Media files for PCs.

       

      I'm thinking that one approach would be to convert the high def .mts files to some uncompressed standard def file format as the initial step of any project, and then importing the standard def footage into Premiere to work with. I know that would decrease the load on the program considerably. However, I'm not sure what the best format would be for this approach, or if there are actually better ways to go about this.

       

      Premiere is an excellent program and I'm sure if I get my process optimized it'll do a fine job. For those of you working with AVCHD, particularly if you aren't going to high def output with your projects, what's your approach to workflow and decent playback performance? Your insights would be most appreciated.

       

      Many thanks,

       

      Chris