SDHC Cards

[videogeorge]

Hi all,

I'm thinking of buying an HD camcorder that records to solid state SDHC cards. Does anyone know what issues, if any, I'll have editing the footage with PE 7?

Thanks,
George

[Paul LS]

Do you know what format it records in or the make and model number of the camera? And is it standard definition or high definition? Either way it will be a compressed format and so will take a lot of computer power. Also some of the H.264 formats do not play well with Premiere Elements. I would try to find some sample footage from the internet and give it a try in Premiere Elements before commiting to buying it.

[videogeorge]

I took the following from an article:

"The camera model is a Panasonic AG-HMC150. It records in the AVCHD format to an SDHC card. AVCHD is a compressed HD video acquisition format based on MPEG-4 (specifically, H.264 or MPEG-4 Advanced Video Codec)."

Thanks for your help, Paul.

[Paul LS]

Nice camcorder... it is an AVCHD format model. AVCHD is very processor intensive and you will need a quad core to be able to edit it in PE7 (or any editor). Because it is highly compressed the processor must decompress it on the fly when previewing/editing. Alternative is to convert to HDV format or another AVI intermediate codec. For example AVCHD Upshift converts the AVCHD to a high quality HDV MPEG2 (60Mbps) which can be edited relatively easily in PE7. http://www.newbluefx.com/avchd-upshift.html

[videogeorge]

Thanks Paul. Looks like the cameras are ahead of the editors at this time. Think I'll hold off a bit to see where it goes.