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avchd or mp4?

Specific to Premiere Elements Version 8.

avchd or mp4?

Postby wyzboing » Wed Aug 03, 2011 11:22 am

Rather than take both my dv camcorder and my stills camera on holiday, I intend to take only my Sony NEX 5 which records to a SDHC memory card. Ii gives me a choice of file formats for recording movies: mp4 or avchd. In the past I have recored in avchd, loaded these in to a project and then converted them to avi before dropping them into my movies. As PE 8 doesn't handle HD very well, the files are very large and, as I don't have anything to play HD on, is there any point in recording in the avchd format? Am I going to get really poor quality recording in mp4? I have done a test run with both and converted them to avi and on my pc screen they both look similar quality. Any movies I make will be exported both as avi for viewing on my pc and onto DVD for viewing on a tv screen. Am I ok with mp4 and do I have a choice of standard or widescreen in this format?

I also have a question about project settings which I will post as a separate thread.

Regards

ps am I in the correct forum?
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Re: avchd or mp4?

Postby Chuck Engels » Wed Aug 03, 2011 11:31 am

This forum is fine for your question :)
I really don't think it will make much difference as it is most likely that both formats still use the H.264 codec anyway. If you don't see a difference in your testing then you should be fine either way. Do you know if the MP4 files are larger than the AVCHD files are for the same length of video? That would tell you if one is more compressed than the other.
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Re: avchd or mp4?

Postby wyzboing » Wed Aug 03, 2011 11:52 am

Thanks Chuck

The difference in the files sizes is not as much as I would have expected: 25.6kb for 14secs of mp4 and 29.1kb for 14 secs of mts.
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Re: avchd or mp4?

Postby Chuck Engels » Wed Aug 03, 2011 3:15 pm

That's kind of what I expected, but the MP4 must be slightly more compressed so I would recommend going with the AVCHD option.
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Re: avchd or mp4?

Postby wyzboing » Fri Aug 05, 2011 3:08 pm

Many thanks for this. I think you just confirmed what I thought.

Regards
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