AVCHD or HDV Capture in Premiere Pro CS4?

[AjSVB]

I have a Sony HDR-HC1 that records in 1080i and use Premiere Pro to Capture using the AVCHD 1080i30 Preset.

The quality looks great but I'm just wondering what the difference between them is and does it matter which one I use to capture as far as quality, size and speed?

[aedipuss]

capturing from that cam can only result in 1440x1080. that's what's on the tape. anything else is the result of encoding to at different format. whether is good enough is up to your eyes.

you can capture the tape with a free tiny utility called hdvsplit. after capturing you can import it into pp and still retain the original video files if you what to use them again.

[edDV]

I'd capture and edit (project format) in HDV. That will perform much better and maintain camera first generation quality for unfiltered frames.

Then I would archive the edit in HDV format. Only then would I encode an AVCHD (1440x1080i 17Mb/s) for playback on a Blu-Ray disc (BD or DVDR).

If you want to fully author a Blu-Ray BD disc, other export formats can be considered.

If you use the AVCHD project format, quality will be reduced and the timeline will become very sluggish as the CPU struggles to decode. Try it. You won't like it.

[AjSVB]

I've been capturing in Premiere and importing to After Effects, which I assume will deal with the footage the same way.
I'm hoping a different format will result in same or better quality but make editing faster.

[edDV]

I've been capturing in Premiere and importing to After Effects, which I assume will deal with the footage the same way.
I'm hoping a different format will result in same or better quality but make editing faster.

Premiere Pro CS3/4/5 supports native HDV editing. I'm fairly certain anything imported into After Effects will be decoded to RGB (or YCbCr in a realtime SDI environment).

There is no reason to convert HDV to AVCHD on the way to RGB. That adds an unnecessary lossy recode.

[AjSVB]

I was assuming Premiere was re-encoding everything from my Camera and therefore i was just looking for better quality and smaller file size and went with AVCHD.

I'm going to revisit HDVsplit again, If I remember right in CS3, After Effects wouldn't accept the file format for whatever reason.

So if I understand this correctly, Premiere will capture in HDV which is "direct stream" from my camera?

[fitch.j]

Yes, when premiere captures from your camera it simply takes the data and saves it. This is eactly what HDVSplit does. Both take the exact data, there is really no reason at all to convert to AVCHD before working. In premiere make sure that you are working on a HDV timeline not an AVCHD one.

In after effects you can simply drag your preimere captured footage into a new comp to start working with it.

[AjSVB]

Good to know, thanks again everyone.

[edDV]

I was assuming Premiere was re-encoding everything from my Camera and therefore i was just looking for better quality and smaller file size and went with AVCHD.

I'm going to revisit HDVsplit again, If I remember right in CS3, After Effects wouldn't accept the file format for whatever reason.

So if I understand this correctly, Premiere will capture in HDV which is "direct stream" from my camera?

HDVsplit or Premiere HDV capture will transfer the data from tape to a file on the hard disk with no recode.

Premiere Pro in HDV project mode will maintain first generation GOP data input to output unless you process frames. In that case only the frames in the affected GOPs get recoded.

Any clips you drag to After Effects will be decoded to RGB for processing.

As for "better quality and smaller frame size" ... Not True. AVCHD would be an additional recode and would only reduce bit rate from 25 Mb/s to 17 Mb/s. There would be significant quality loss from an unnecessary recode. You would also see a significant slow down in performance for an AVCHD project setting.

When your edit project is complete, you can then encode to desired distribution formats.