AVCHD to AVI

[josel]

I will be using neoscene to convert my AVCHD from my camcorder into a AVI format, so I can edit the footage in Premiere Pro CS3. If I do, will i lose any quality? If so how much? and is their anyway around it?

Thank you.

[edDV]

I will be using neoscene to convert my AVCHD from my camcorder into a AVI format, so I can edit the footage in Premiere Pro CS3. If I do, will i lose any quality? If so how much? and is their anyway around it?

Thank you.

First some basics.

If you use Neoscene to convert AVCHD, you aren't converting to "AVI". You are converting to the Cineform codec in an avi wrapper.

Your computer basics aren't clear. It seems you are far from minimum CS3 or Neoscene specs.

[RogerTango]

I have been converting MTS files from my camcorder into AVI files with XviD for video and MP3 for audio for quite a while now... I love the way that Ulead Media Studio Pro works for me... but it is very limited with importing files.

Anyway, you CAN retain much of the original video quality by providing the video CODEC with a high enough bitrate.

Andrew

[RogerTango]

You can use handbrakecli version .093 or the latest FFMPEG to read TS & M2TS files and encode to XviD/MP3 AVIs no problems.

HTH,
Andrew

[_Al_]

He is set to work with Neoscene, I would leave it to that, it is lossless, XviD is not.

[poisondeathray]

He is set to work with Neoscene, I would leave it to that, it is lossless, XviD is not.

Cineform isn't truly lossless, but very close. There are quality settings you can use, like "filmscan2" would give higher bitrates, higher quality compared to something like "medium"

[RogerTango]

He is set to work with Neoscene, I would leave it to that, it is lossless, XviD is not.

Ahhh, I missed that somehow. I think FFMPEG can do Huff which is close maybe? Anyway.... missed the codec thingy.

[poisondeathray]

He is set to work with Neoscene, I would leave it to that, it is lossless, XviD is not.

Ahhh, I missed that somehow. I think FFMPEG can do Huff which is close maybe? Anyway.... missed the codec thingy.

FFMPEG can do huffyuv, but it doesn't edit as smoothly as cineform

Also Premiere doesn't treat huffyuv as YUV , it gets converted to RGB - so technically it's not lossless in premiere either (you can have problems with superbrights clipping)

[edDV]

Back to the original question,

I will be using neoscene to convert my AVCHD from my camcorder into a AVI format, so I can edit the footage in Premiere Pro CS3. If I do, will i lose any quality? If so how much? and is their anyway around it?

Quality loss is low and you can control file size vs. quality using the following Cineform chart. As you can see, the Windows version allows two greater compression settings.


Note that native 24 mbps AVCHD is approx 3MB/sec and 12 GB/hr.

But you need to focus on the end result. At most settings, conversion to Cineform is less lossy than editing AVCHD directly in Premiere CS4/5 since the full timeline gets re-encoded anyway. CS3 can't edit AVCHD directly so you have no choice.

The Cineform codec is optimized for timeline search performance and for low generation and processing loss.

[poisondeathray]

At most settings, conversion to Cineform is less lossy than editing AVCHD directly in Premiere CS4/5 since the full timeline gets re-encoded anyway.

I disagree, you're re-encoding the entire asset to cineform, so it's an extra round of generation loss (albeit tiny if you use filmscan2)

AVCHD => Premiere CS4/5/6 => Final Format , is less lossy than : AVCHD => Cineform => Premiere CS4/5/6 => Final Format

[edDV]

At most settings, conversion to Cineform is less lossy than editing AVCHD directly in Premiere CS4/5 since the full timeline gets re-encoded anyway.

I disagree, you're re-encoding the entire asset to cineform, so it's an extra round of generation loss (albeit tiny if you use filmscan2)

AVCHD => Premiere CS4/5/6 => Final Format , is less lossy than : AVCHD => Cineform => Premiere CS4/5/6 => Final Format

Small loss in exchange for editing and generation performance. You are assuming a cuts only workflow. If the user is filtering or adding layers, then the AVCHD workflow adds a color space conversion to RGB.
AVCHD => Premiere CS4/5/6 =>RGB => Final Format

[poisondeathray]

At most settings, conversion to Cineform is less lossy than editing AVCHD directly in Premiere CS4/5 since the full timeline gets re-encoded anyway.

I disagree, you're re-encoding the entire asset to cineform, so it's an extra round of generation loss (albeit tiny if you use filmscan2)

AVCHD => Premiere CS4/5/6 => Final Format , is less lossy than : AVCHD => Cineform => Premiere CS4/5/6 => Final Format

Small loss in exchange for editing and generation performance. You are assuming a cuts only workflow. If the user is filtering or adding layers, then the AVCHD workflow adds a color space conversion to RGB.
AVCHD => Premiere CS4/5/6 =>RGB => Final Format

I'm not assuming anything

You incur the same RGB conversion with cineform if you use RGB color correction filters, in addition to the cineform generation loss, so it's worse in term of quality

I use cineform frequently when I don't need a completely lossless workflow. The quality loss really is neglible with filmscan2 for most cases. But it still is lossy.

But what you said earlier is simply wrong. You cannot keep the same level quality - by definition that's what a lossy format is. Direct decoding of original format will always yield higher quality than lossy re-encoding.

By the way, in CS5/6 it is possible to stay in YCbCr entirely end to end with some color correction filters, the ones labelled "YUV" (for native AVCHD or cineform)

[edDV]

At most settings, conversion to Cineform is less lossy than editing AVCHD directly in Premiere CS4/5 since the full timeline gets re-encoded anyway.

I disagree, you're re-encoding the entire asset to cineform, so it's an extra round of generation loss (albeit tiny if you use filmscan2)

AVCHD => Premiere CS4/5/6 => Final Format , is less lossy than : AVCHD => Cineform => Premiere CS4/5/6 => Final Format

Small loss in exchange for editing and generation performance. You are assuming a cuts only workflow. If the user is filtering or adding layers, then the AVCHD workflow adds a color space conversion to RGB.
AVCHD => Premiere CS4/5/6 =>RGB => Final Format

I'm not assuming anything

You incur the same RGB conversion with cineform if you use RGB color correction filters, in addition to the cineform generation loss, so it's worse in term of quality

I use cineform frequently when I don't need a completely lossless workflow. But what you said earlier is simply wrong. I just wanted to clarify the facts.

In CS5/6 it is possible to stay in YCbCr entirely with some color correction filters, the ones labelled "YUV"

I agree there will be some loss but with other benefits. You are right that an AVCHD cuts workflow may have less loss but I don't think this is possible with Premiere CS3.

[poisondeathray]

I agree there will be some loss but with other benefits. You are right that an AVCHD cuts workflow may have less loss but I don't think this is possible with Premiere CS3.

I' m not saying a AVCHD cuts only workflow. I'm referring to any workflow, any situation.

Lossy re-encoding will always give you lower quality than the original. It's as simple as that. I agree with everything else you said, except for this:

At most settings, conversion to Cineform is less lossy than editing AVCHD directly in Premiere CS4/5 since the full timeline gets re-encoded anyway

The main benefit of cineform is ease of editing, secondary benefit is perhaps better chroma upsamping (also there was a bad AVCHD chroma upscaling bug in CS4), and the tradeoff is some quality loss (really quite negigible for most scenarios at filmscan2), and of course increased storage requirements. It's a great solution for CS3 and slower computers with CS4-6. There is even a free version now.