AVCCAM (AVCHD) Video Workflow with Adobe Premiere Pro CS3
The AG-HMC150 is Panasonic’s new AVCCAM (AVCHD) camera that employs MPEG-4 AVC/H.264, long-GOP SD card technology [1]. The HMC150’s design is similar to the Panasonic AG-DVX100 in size and weight; however, recording in HD formats including 1080/60i, 1080/30p, 1080/24p, 720/60p, 720/30p, 720/24p, the camera is marketed as an inexpensive but superior alternative to HDV cameras. The literature also informs me that the “AVCHD format uses CABAC (Context Adaptive Binary Arithmetic Coding) for its variable-length encoding.” I don’t know what that means, but it sure sounds impressive!
Although you can’t purchase the HMC150 yet, my local rental shop [2] recently acquired a test camera from Panasonic, and I took the opportunity to try it out.
Before going into the field with the camera, I shot a few clips on a 4GB SD card, ejected the media from the camera, put the SD card into my computer, and opened my preferred search engine to learn how to ingest the AVCHD’s native MTS footage. Since I currently edit on Premiere Pro CS3, I spent awhile on forums reading the about the Premiere CS3 / AVCHD workflow.
I learned about editing AVCHD natively in CS3; about converting (transcoding) AVCHD footage to DVCPRO HD with the free MainConcept transcoder; about skipping the native AVCHD format altogether by capturing HDMI footage with the Blackmagic Intensity Pro card. Since all of my footage ends up on the Internet in the form of web video, a bit of loss in footage quality from AVCHD to DVCPRO that I read about in forums seemed acceptable to me. I was also familiar with editing native MXF footage of the Panasonic HVX200 P2 workflow in Premiere Pro, so I set out to explore the transcoding process. An Adobe page called “AVCHD support in Premiere Pro CS3 and Premiere Elements 4” [3] provided more solutions, including a link to download the AVCHD to DVCPRO HD Transcoder [4]. Panasonic’s web page for the AVCCAM [5] also provided valuable insight and links [6].
MAINCONCEPT AVCHD to DVCPRO HD TRANSCODER
The Panasonic Japan site offers five different downloadable programs, in exchange for your name and email address. I was interested in the AVCHD Transcoder, and after submitting the download form, Panasonic sent me an email with a link to download the program.
I downloaded, installed and launched the transcoder software. The interface is no-frills and dead simple. You can drill down to an individual asset or open all the assets within a folder. On the PC side, the file path will look something like this: PRIVATE/AVCHD/BDMV/STREAM/00000.MTS. I chose to view a preview of every frame, but other options are available.
After transcoding, I was left with the familiar DVCPRO file structure. From this point I could simply import the MXF footage into Premiere Pro CS3 and start editing.
LINKS
[1] AG-HMC150 Brochure, from the Panasonic website:
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