Hi - hopefully someone can shed some light on this.

I am hoping to upgrade my Mini-DV camcorder to a High-Def model soon, and the choice seems to be between HDV tapes and AVCHD.  I like the look of the Panasonic AG-HMC41 which records AVCHD to an SD card, but a friend has voiced his concerns about editing AVCHD.  Is it possible to achieve frame-accurate editing with AVCHD in Studio 14?  I now have a quad core PC so I think it should be fast enough to handle it.

Cheers

Mark

There is more to it than just having a Quad core PC.  I am using Canon's VIXIA HF200 HD camera that shoots 1920x1080x29.97 fps and stores in H.264 formant.  I am recording at 24 MBits.

When I was editing and had a 128 MB video card, I was struggling to do anything in Studio 14.  In Studio 12, I had to load the files from the SD-HC card into a project, and save it as a file as a MPEG.

 I now have a 1 GB NVIDIA 9500 GT card.  Last night, I just processed in Studio 14 a 55 minute DVD with transitions, menus, and other video effects without issue.  That was a first.  I have only had the NVIDIA card for 2 days.

 So far, it seems having the right video card makes a world of difference to what you can do.

 

Do you know if it is possible to do frame-accurate editing with AVCHD?

Frame-editing of AVCHD, with the proper PC, is not any different than HDV.  There are complete frames.  However, different from AVI or MJPEG, a complete fresh frame is created only about twice each second, and the intermediate ones incorporate only motion changes, with the integrity depending on the bitrate and the use of dynamic (motion dependent) or constant bitrate modes.  AVCHD shot at low, dynamic bitrates will be OK for light motion, but less than ideal for pans or fast action.  However, you can hunt through the frames of mediocre or even poor AVCHD to pick or grab frames that look reasonably OK.