I am at a loss to explain it, so maybe the combined wisdom here can help me with this question:

Why is it that almost all the consumer and prosumer cameras have gone to the AVCHD format? I know it looks better in the specs (because it presumably has more pixels than HDV), but it also has less Mbps, yielding, on average, a lesser picture quality than HDV. In addition, HDV uses the MPEG2 codec, so it is more natively compatible with DVDs.

So other than a marketing ploy, what's behind all the camera makers lining up and supporting AVCHD as the supposedly de facto standard for the next generation camcorders?

In a related question, why has firewire gone away? I saw nothing wrong with it, and many reasons to keep it around. But trying to find an AVCHD camera with firewire is impossible. I have looked, they just don't exist.But why?

In general, cameras are moving toward file based formats such as AVCHD. The advantage is you don't have to digitize the material to work with it. You just copy the files from the camera to your hard drive and, depending on your editing application, you are ready to go. AVCHD and P2 are examples of file based cameras.

The reason none of these cameras have firewire ports is because they are not necessary. You just use the USB port to copy the files to your hard drive.

There is no doubt that the future for video cameras is file based and not tape based. AVCHD. While not a good format for editing because of the large amount of compression, AVCHD is very space efficient and allows the use of inexpensive memory cards to capture large amounts of video. Many programs such as Final Cut transcode the AVCHD material to their intermediate codec in order to edit it easily. Pinnacle Studio works with AVCHD natively but then it has limited editing capabilities so it may not be as big an issue in a program like Studio. Media Composer has yet to support AVCHD. The other issue is that AVCHD is not a 100% standardized format. Sony and Panasonic have their own versions of it. I beleive that Vegas only will edit the Sony version.

AVCHD is not marketing hype.  It is a much better form of compression that is at least 2x better at compression.  This means AVCHD at 20 mbits/s looks like what mpeg2 would look like at 40 mbits/s.  AVCHD is also a more modern clean form of compression so quality wise it can totally blow away mpeg2.  In theory AVCHD can be easier to deal with due to the fact that you don't have to capture video.  A AVCHD user can just transfer video from their card and start working on their footage.  I said in theory because AVCHD needs a lot of horse power to work with.  You can edit on many modern systems but the process will be much slower then editing HDV.  If you can get by the much slower rending times then avchd can be a decent format to work with.  To be honest the whole 1440x1080 vs 1920x1080 is a bit of hype although there is a small difference.  No consumer chips or lens is ever going to resolve enough detail to really make a difference.  The fact that avchd is 1920 however isn't what makes it look better but just the nature of how well mpeg4 compresses compared to mpeg2.

 

So the basic rough and dirty rule of thumb is when you see a bitrate listed for a avchd camera, double it to know what will look like compared to a mpeg2 camera.

Smetvid

You had a poll awhile ago about people wanting an AVCHD transcoder for Liquid, what were the results?

Thanks to all who weighed in on this. But let me say why I don't understand what's going on.

Despite the fact that AVCHD has the POTENTIAL for better images, it started out inferior to MPEG2. There have been some improvements as time has passed, but many will tell you that AVCHD is still not ready for prime time. I have no doubt it will, in time, eclipse MPEG2.

So, that said, and despite the fact that AVCHD is file based, I still can't understand the abandonment of firewire. There are good reasons that firewire is a more robust than USB, or HDMI, because it is a bi-directional protocol. That means I can control my camera from my computer. This is super useful when I want to, say, have a studio setup with fixed cameras that need to communicate with a controlling  device. Or, when I work in the field and want to use firewire to hook up auxiliary devices, like a field scope that would give me access to certain camera functions that no other protocol can do?

I suppose I am just PO'd that they took away firewire for no really good reason.

Personally if you are able to just transfer the video over firewire really is useless. Why control your cam when you can just drop the footage in your editing software and go at it.

well the whole point to file based recording is that you no longer need any form of deck control through firewire.  In fact if you have a SD slot on your computer your camera never has to go anywhere near your computer.

 AVCHD when it started out wasn't as good for a few main reasons.

1.  The bitrate was kind of low at first. 

2.  Hardware encoding chips get better over time.  To encode mpeg4 in realtime you need one heck of a decent chip built into that camera.  The H264 encoding chips are much better now then they were when they first came out.  A hardware encoding chip is no different then a software encoding chip in that not everyone is created equally.

3.  The main reason why AVCHD may not look at good as some HDV based cameras is due to the type of camera.  Almost all AVCHD cameras are cheap consumer based cameras.  HDV on the other hand has a wide range of highend cameras.  A video codec is only as good as the lens and DSP that send video to it.  An encoder will never make a medicore camera look great.  You throw crappy video at a encoder it is still going to look crappy.  If you put a AVCHD encoder inside of a Sony EX1 your video will still look great because the EX1 is a good quality camera.  If you put the Sony XDCAM codec in the body of a cheap first generation AVCHD camera the video will still look crappy.

4.  Not ready for prime time was always more for the fact that the footage was hard to play back let alone edit with.  This is changing a little bit but it is still a pain to deal with.  This is why some of the highest end systems in the world such as Avid MC and Apple FCP transcode to a easy to work with format.  Sure it increases the file size but converting AVCHD to ProRes422 not only looks amazing but is super easy to work with.

 The one thing that does bother me about AVCHD is the fact that companies seem to think you have to use it for solid state.  JVC has proved that this isn't true.  You can record great looking mpeg2 video to SD cards.  Personally I would rather have to use a larger card and shoot mpeg2 then deal with the problems of editing later on.  With that said however I still think AVCHD edges out mpeg2 a bit in terms of quality.  The latest AVCHD cameras use bitrates up to 24 mbits/s which would be like mpeg2 at 50 mbits/s which is a very solid bitrate for video.  That can and will look better then mpeg2 at 35 mbits/s on the JVC cameras.  If somebody would actually make a AVCHD camera as good as the Sony EX1 I bet you would be very surprised at the level of quality.

Smet,

 You almost have me sold. You said:

" The latest AVCHD cameras use bitrates up to 24 mbits/s which would be like mpeg2 at 50 mbits/s which is a very solid bitrate for video."

Can you name the cameras that you are thinking of that do this? I am in the market for a new camera or two, and of course, want to get the best! ;)

 

Canon makes several. See here. Also, here is a 21mbs Panasonic professional AVCHD camera. This camera is designed to match the video quality as close as possible to the P2 cameras.

Smetvid

What about the results of the poll you took?

Panasonic also makes a HMC40 camera that is very good and very low cost at the same time.  It also uses 21 mbits/s which happens to be the average with 24 mbits the peak bitrate.  Personally I have not been very impressed with the HMC150 camera from Panasonic.  It has what I like to call a very hamburger look to it.  Ironically the HMC40 looks much better but it isn't as good in low light.  It is far from a consumer camera and uses 3x cmos chips and even offers native 24p shooting.  Like Lew pointed Canon also makes some darn good AVCHD cameras.  I have seen footage from these cameras that blows away the HDV footage from the Canon cameras.  Of course the hardware is pretty much the exact same in the case of Canon so they are a perfect example of how different the encoding is.

 

 

 I'm not sure what to do about the AVCHD poll yet.  I have been doing some research for the best way to deal with this.  Ironically I have no problem converting the video but the audio is being a major pain for me at this stage.  Clearly a conversion tool doesn't do anybody any good if it cannot handle audio.  Well I can get the audio to work but it is mono with only the left channel used.  If I can figure out how to fix this then maybe something could happen.

http://www.dvxuser.com/articles/article.php/25

Here is a comparison between raw AVCHD and 35 mbit XDCAM EX mpeg2 video.  This test is very fair because it used the raw SDI feed to an external AVCHD recording device.  This way both samples were recorded from the same camera source at the same time.  You couldn't ask for a better raw codec comparison.

Keep in mind this is compared to the 35 mbit form of mpeg2.  HDV would look even worse.

I still cannot stand editing with AVCHD but I am actually very impressed with what it can do.  The fact that 21 mbits can blow away mpeg2 at 35 mbits is just amazing.  I just wish archiving wasn't such a pain.

 

 

On another note Sony will be announcing their new pro series AVCHD cameras today.  The world is quickly moving to a H264 world.

Maybe this should become its own thread about an AVCHD to MPG-2, but what is the issue with the audio if you don't mind my asking? Truth be known, I almost never use both channels when I record in the field anywaty. Is there nothing available or nothing for free available? I for one would be delighted to pay a royalty to have something that avoided transcoding twice before it can be used. I'd be willing to pay and hold-harmless, in fact. I'd be grouchy, of course. ;-)

And to be a little more on topic, I get the advantages in storage and transmission for AVCHD. But the only thing in the computer world that seems to be deviating from Moore's law is processor speed. I have a brand new i7 box sitting right next to a P4 and yes it's faster, but not jaw dropping the way the P4 was against a P3. On the other hand storage.....well you can find half gig hard drives for $49 now. What's the point of better compression at the price of more intensive processing if storage is near free and CPU cycles are dear? That's why I don't get AVCHD.

Smetvid:

Panasonic also makes a HMC40 camera that is very good and very low cost at the same time.  It also uses 21 mbits/s which happens to be the average with 24 mbits the peak bitrate. 

I noticed on Panasonic's site this quote:

" Panasonic offers a free transcoder that will convert AVCHD files to DVCPRO HD P2 or downconverted DV files for further workflow solutions. "

Have you tried it?

moodman:

Smetvid:

Panasonic also makes a HMC40 camera that is very good and very low cost at the same time.  It also uses 21 mbits/s which happens to be the average with 24 mbits the peak bitrate. 

I noticed on Panasonic's site this quote:

" Panasonic offers a free transcoder that will convert AVCHD files to DVCPRO HD P2 or downconverted DV files for further workflow solutions. "

Have you tried it?

Many Liquid and MC users have used this transcoder. It works well but only with Panasonic cameras. It creates a virtural P2 format card on your hard drive which can be X-Received into Liquid. I have tested it with Liquid and some sample files and can confirm it works.

LewS:

moodman:

Smetvid:

Panasonic also makes a HMC40 camera that is very good and very low cost at the same time.  It also uses 21 mbits/s which happens to be the average with 24 mbits the peak bitrate. 

I noticed on Panasonic's site this quote:

" Panasonic offers a free transcoder that will convert AVCHD files to DVCPRO HD P2 or downconverted DV files for further workflow solutions. "

Have you tried it?

Many Liquid and MC users have used this transcoder. It works well but only with Panasonic cameras. It creates a virtural P2 format card on your hard drive which can be X-Received into Liquid. I have tested it with Liquid and some sample files and can confirm it works.

Lew,

Are you saying that this trasncoder only works with files FROM Panasonic cameras, but not with AVCHD files from other cameras? I thought an AVCHD file was an AVCHD file no matter its source. I smell something proprietary going on here...

mmyers:

And to be a little more on topic, I get the advantages in storage and transmission for AVCHD. But the only thing in the computer world that seems to be deviating from Moore's law is processor speed. I have a brand new i7 box sitting right next to a P4 and yes it's faster, but not jaw dropping the way the P4 was against a P3. On the other hand storage.....well you can find half gig hard drives for $49 now. What's the point of better compression at the price of more intensive processing if storage is near free and CPU cycles are dear? That's why I don't get AVCHD.

 

The problem isn't so much storage later on but being able to shoot a decent amount of video.  SD cards are cheaper now then they have ever been but they still can be expensive if you have to keep flipping cards every 10 minutes.  There is a certain point when the bitrate becomes too high to cover the time it takes to transfer material.  If it takes you longer to transfer material then it does to shoot it then you will need multiple cards.  If a company did make a camera that shot mpeg2 at 50 mbits/s (yes I know there is one already) you would need twich as many cards to shoot with.  This is to get the same basic level of quality that AVCHD can shoot with at half the bitrate.  So in terms of shooting a small size is very important.

Also the size of the highest level of AVCHD isn't really any smaller then HDV.  What it does do however is give you literally over twice the level of quality for the same bitrate.  This means very good quality while still being able to shoot the same amount of video per card.

As for the audio issue I am having it is very complicated.  Basically I have no way of splitting the audio into a left audio file and a right audio file.  This means that during import into Liquid the stereo audio track will be treated as just a left audio because Liquid assumes when you import elementary streams that the audio is already split apart.  Of course you could always import the audio on it's own and line it up with the video but that could be a major pain for hundreds of clips.

The first version of the Panasonic transcoder would work with any AVCHD. The later versions only work for Panasonic AVCHDs. And no, not all AVCHD files are identical. There are profile levels as well as different bit rates supported by the AVCHD standard.

moodman:

LewS:

moodman:

Smetvid:

Panasonic also makes a HMC40 camera that is very good and very low cost at the same time.  It also uses 21 mbits/s which happens to be the average with 24 mbits the peak bitrate. 

I noticed on Panasonic's site this quote:

" Panasonic offers a free transcoder that will convert AVCHD files to DVCPRO HD P2 or downconverted DV files for further workflow solutions. "

Have you tried it?

Many Liquid and MC users have used this transcoder. It works well but only with Panasonic cameras. It creates a virtural P2 format card on your hard drive which can be X-Received into Liquid. I have tested it with Liquid and some sample files and can confirm it works.

Lew,

Are you saying that this trasncoder only works with files FROM Panasonic cameras, but not with AVCHD files from other cameras? I thought an AVCHD file was an AVCHD file no matter its source. I smell something proprietary going on here...

 

You just discovered the major flaw of a tapeless world.  There is no longer any form of standards.  In the past it cost a lot of money for somebody to develop a new tape format.  Once you had a format most other companies had to conform to that tape formats standards.  In the file based world their are no standards to conform to so everybody just sort of does their own thing.  The video codec itself, H264, is more or less the same.  It is the meta data and the way the audio and video are wrapped into their mts containers that makes them not compatible with each other.  People had issues with the fact that their was HDV 1 and HDV 2 but that was nothing compared to the mess we have to deal with now.

This seems like technology moving on for the big guys but I can tell you that it causing many problems for the members of our video club who go out & by a new camera at Best Buy 7 then get home & wonder what to do with it.

Technology sometimes advances slowly, and sometimes by leaps and bounds. AVCHD, as far as most editing packages are concerned, is a leap-and-bounds issue. Sony Vegas had a head start because Sony was involved with development of AVCHD camcorders. Everyone else had to pretty much wait and see what developed.

Also, the format was designed for efficient capture, not efficient editing. IMHO I don't think anyone should be editing in AVCHD; I think it's better to take a 1-generation hit and resample to something that is efficient for editing and then doing the edits. There's no real reason for keeping the material in AVCHD as it's not a good format for archiving an edited timeline for re-editing later on. It is a good format for archiving a final project (actually AVC as used by BluRay is the format, but even that's not exactly the same as AVCHD).

And archiving the material is really the big issue right now. Even to archive raw AVCHD you have to go to BluRay data disks (or a lot of DVDs). At least until someone comes up with 32Gb flash drives with guaranteed 100-year retention at a price below $1/Gb.

DStone:

The first version of the Panasonic transcoder would work with any AVCHD. The later versions only work for Panasonic AVCHDs. And no, not all AVCHD files are identical. There are profile levels as well as different bit rates supported by the AVCHD standard.

Dave,

Then we all ought to get our hands on the FIRST version of the transcoder. Unless it has major flaws, that one sounds like the one to work with, no?

You can download the first version of the transcoder here.

You guys are AWESOME! You turned around my thinking about AVCHD. I was going to buy an HDV camera because of the firewire. Though I still want it, the superiority (potential or real) of the AVCHD codec outweighs my concerns about firewire.

Thanks to all.