High Quality AVCHD to MPEG2/HDV Conversion?

[Steamage]

I edit a lot of HDV footage from my own cameras (Canon XH-A1s, HV20) and from a couple of friends (another XH-A1 and a Sony FX1000). I use Avid Liquid 7.2 (AL72) for editing, "fuse" to HDV-like MPEG2 M2V and MPA files and import into TMPGenc Authoring Works 4 (AW4) to create BDMV Blu-ray discs. I've been using this all-MPEG2 work-flow for about 4 years. It's suits me well because it requires minimal re-encoding - only transitions, captions and rare shots that need a bit of colour-correction, etc. are rendered. Therefore it's quite quick with little or no loss of quality from the original camera files.

Now one of my pals has bought a new camera (Canon G20, I think?) that shoots AVCHD. Only one problem - neither AL72 nor AW4 can work with AVCHD/MPEG4. I'm not in a position to upgrade my computer and software just at the moment - as much as anything because of the learning curve.

So, I need a recommendation for a reliable method to convert AVCHD camera files to HDV2 format - or as near as I can get - with the minimum loss of quality, that will run on my rather old Win XP computer. A batch converter that I can safely leave to run overnight would be ideal. If it's free, then great, but I'm happy to pay a few £ for something that's stable and high quality.

I'm new to this site, but I've been messing around with video cameras and NLE programs for more than 10 years. I've done a bit of research around the forum, found quite a few threads about AVCHD when it was new ('08-'09) and quite a few posts along the lines of "this used to be a great tool but the new version just crashes..." I haven't yet found an up-to-date review/comparison of available tools, nor any recent recommendations. Hopefully, someone can point me to a thread or article where this has all been covered before...

HDV2 = MPEG2 CBR 25Mbps, 1440x1080 16:9 (non-square pixel), 4:2:0, 25fps interlaced (i.e. 50 fields, top field first) in M2T transport-stream container file. Audio stream is MP3, 16-bit, 48kHz, 384 bps (I think).
I'm not entirely sure of the AVCHD format my friend is using, but I've recommended he shoot 50i at the camera's highest bit-rate, which I think is 24Mbps. I'm almost certain it's 1920x1080 square pixels.

[aedipuss]

if you've got the hard drive space you might consider converting the avchd to ut lossless if al72 can use it. DNxHD, huffyuv and lagarith are other options. i'm not aware of anything other than an editor like vegas pro or premiere that would have a preset for HDV output.

HDV has crippled mp2 audio.

[Steamage]

if you've got the hard drive space you might consider converting the avchd to ut lossless if al72 can use it. DNxHD, huffyuv and lagarith are other options.

Thanks. Interesting idea. Liquid can work with an uncompressed format, which of course is truly huge, but I don't think it can handle anything in between. I don't think I have enough disc space to cope with uncompressed. Also, I'd then be reliant on Liquid's re-encoding - not that that's a bad thing. In it's day, Liquid's MPEG2 encoder was highly thought of.

i'm not aware of anything other than an editor like vegas pro or premiere that would have a preset for HDV output.

Sooner or later, I will have to replace Liquid with a more up-to-date NLE, and upgrade my copmuter to match. But not just yet. In the mean time, I suppose I need a tool that lets me make my own preset, perhaps based on an existing one that's very close.

As I understand it, the most difficult aspect will be converting from 1920x1080 to 1440x1080 pixels. It's quite stiff test of any converter.

[aedipuss]

yeah it's kind of tough to try and work with 7 or 8 year old discontinued software. you'd be better off finding a copy of vegas studio on sale. or a year old version for 30-40 bucks.

[smrpix]

TMPGenc Mastering Works is about the least expensive thing that outputs a truly compliant HDV file. it's great. But for the same price or less, I agree with aedipuss, just pick up a copy of Vegas Movie Studio

[Steamage]

In the end I went with a copy of TMPGEnc Video Mastering Works 5. Since I already use TMPGEnc Authoring Works 4, I got a 30% discount. It seems to do a pretty good job of making HDV2 m2ts file from AVCHD input.

It has also proved useful converting converting all sorts of bits of odd video for friends.

[turk690]

I ran into the same situation with TMPGenc AW4 before AW5 came out. All it cared for was MPEG2 (TMPGenc has an excellent MPEG2 encoder); what I did prior to authoring was to separately frameserve the AVCHD to HCenc to create blu-ray compliant MPEG2 files. Although AW5 is a supposed step-up over AW4, the MPEG4 capability was achieved by throwing quite freeware x264 into the mix.