Convert my AVCHD video to what format to use smoothly in Premiere CS5

[Henkie]

Hi guys,

Im on a pc with cs5.5, 4 gb of ram and a nvidea 9500gt videocard and a quadcore...

The playbavk and editting of my avchd material in premiere isnt very smoothly. Im looking to convert it to a format that premiere likes and lets me edit easily without being choppy...

Ive looked at intermediate codecs, but their filesizes are huge! I want my file to be about the same as the source file... I have no problem with converting my material to a more compressed format e.g. Mp4/h264...but when i do that, playback still seems choppy....

The bitrate of my avchd files is about 20mb i think, so if i kinda stick to that bitrate, quality loss will be acceptable right?

Can anyone recommend a format that will meet my requierments and is easily edittable in premier?

Apologies for my poor english, and thank you in advance...

[edDV]

You need less compression not more. Gold standard for AVCHD is Cineform Neoscene + a large enough second drive.

[Henkie]

Ok, but thats out of my budget right now....any alternatives? Thanks!

[edDV]

Ok, but thats out of my budget right now....any alternatives? Thanks!

For free there is the AVID DNxHD codec which is similar to MJPEG.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNxHD_codec
http://www.avid.com/US/search?q=DNxHD+codec&x=18&y=8

Also trusty old huffyuv.

[Henkie]

I have tried those, and they work fine indeed..the only problem is (forgot to mention this), is that I would like to see thumbnails for these video's in explorer and bridge...but that doesnt seem to be possible, does it?

[edDV]

Don't know

[rallymax]

You may want to try AVC Intra. Getting rid of ther temperal information (B & P) frames might be enough to give you smooth playback.
At least that way you still have small video files and it's a little easier for the PC to play it back.
I have a Core 2 Quad @2.6GHz. With 4Gb of RAM (and it's only DDR2-800MHz) it couldn't do AVCHD. I bumped it up to 8Gb of RAM (still at a slow 800MHz) and it was a lot better. (I assigned 7.5Gb to Adobe programs)
To help you a little more AVC Intra (which is AVCHD with only I-frames) will defintely take some CPU load off if that's the problem (vs available memory and hard disk speed).
AVCHD will still give you .264/.m4v/.mts files which can be thumbnailed - thus why I thought of it for you.

[Brainiac]

Just wanted to chime in - are you by any chance using a USB drive for your video files, because that can affect playback and editing in my experience? When I switched to eSata, then that solved my problem.

Brainiac