AVCHD Converter

[butterflies]

Thanks guys!

Ron, I am not very into this technical stuff. What stands HQ for?

I would like to explain what I actually want to be able to do: I have a NIKON D300 on top of a microscope. I want to capture (and edit) the hdmi (Live View) output from this SLR. What would you suggest is the best (and cheapest) solution. Would there be others then the converter or the BMI card?

[Ron Evans]

HQ is the Canopus HQ intermediate codec sorry for the abbreviation. In your case you could use the Intensity card, its about $250 and will let you capture uncompressed to the PC if you have a PC that is up to that or to MJPG codec that comes with it or if you have Cinefrom NEO capture realtime to Cineform intermediate that can be used with any NLE that is VFW compatible( it works really well with Premiere PRO).

Ron Evans

[butterflies]

Dear moderator,
This thread was longer. What happened?
Rob

[butterflies]

HQ is the Canopus HQ intermediate codec sorry for the abbreviation. In your case you could use the Intensity card, its about $250 and will let you capture uncompressed to the PC if you have a PC that is up to that or to MJPG codec that comes with it or if you have Cinefrom NEO capture realtime to Cineform intermediate that can be used with any NLE that is VFW compatible( it works really well with Premiere PRO).

Ron Evans

Thanks Ron,
It seems that the video signal from the nikon d300 is 15 fps only. Will that give complications?
Rob

[Ron Evans]

I don't know for sure if frame rate is really a problem. You could send a mail to Blackmagic and find out.
Ron Evans

[UlfLaursen]

Hi

I just did some tests with the fairly new AVCHD Convert tool and my newly upgraded quadcore, 4GB, XP Pro.

I was lucky to get a Canon HF10 to test - we sell canon cams at work so I got one from Canon in Denmark to try out.

I found that converting was aprox 1-1 in time. Don't know if it matters if the files are a lot small or it is one big. I am going to test with one big later tonight when it is finished to record.

My goal was to save time. Today I use my Canon HV20 to record ½ to 1 hrs. every week for editing. I wanted to save some of that time by getting a HF10 instead, but I can see I need faster Processors to get the job done quicker - probably dual quad xeons or something like that, and that's too much atm. in cost.

The quality is fine, and playback / editing if the HQ clips in 1920 x 1080 runs smooth too, but converting takes the same time as cakturing, so the only thing I would save is tape-cost.

I tried to edit the native mts-files, but that was impossible.

/Ulf

[Ron Evans]

I have just got my new computer up and running. Gigabyte X48-DQ6, Q9450 quad core, 8G RAM, Palit HD3850, 250G Boot, 250G Temp/Preview/Projects, 750G storage, 750G storage and two external eSATA 500G storage, Vista 64 Home Premium. Having turned pretty much everything off set at VISTA Basic Color it looks just like WIN XP!!!. Conversion times for a 1 hour Sony AVCHD file from a SR11 was about 2.5 times realtime or close to 2 1/2 hours. This was converting from one hard drive and writing to another using the latest converter 2.1. Looking at the performance window of Vista, CPU is only 34%, disk even less, RAM seemed to be fully used, only one processor seems to be running at about 70%, another at about 30% the other two with almost no activity!!!! maybe if there more smaller files the conversion would be quicker but this was a 1 hour performance and from the SOny gets transfered to the PC as one file. I recorded two performances each with two parts so have 4 files each from two cameras ranging from 9G to 14G in size that will have to be converted from both a SR7 and SR11 so looking at about 25 hours!!! It took about 1 hour and 15 mins to transfer to the PC from both cameras.
Ron Evans

[THoff]

Ron, are you using V2.10 of the AVCHD converter? It's supposed to improve performance on multi-core/multi-processor systems.

[Ron Evans]

Yes I am using V 2.1. On my old system an AMD X2 4200 it would have taken 10 times real time( with V 2.1) so the processor change and time change is in line. Q9450 is about 4 times faster than the X2 4200 on most benchmarks I have seen. I converted at the standard HQ settings leading to files that are about 4 times bigger. I have not looked at the other options of Cineform etc as I want to finish this show on Edius quickly but will do so next week.

Ron Evans

[UlfLaursen]

Hi Ron

On my PC I have aprox. 65-72% utilization on the CPU's on XP Pro 32. Sounds strange that your covertion is so much slower than mine. I did convert between 2 different discs too.

Could it be different formats? don't know if the Sony and Canon AVCHD is the exactly the same.

/Ulf

[Mr Bill]

Hi guys,

I work for a company that uses these files a lot (I can't stand AVCHD files)
So I have started to learn about the joys of wasting time converting these files to be usable for editing....

Look at the pdf manual that comes with the new converter.
It states that if you want to use ALL cores of your CPU, then you must drag the file/s onto the AVCPRV icon.

If you right click and convert it that way it wont use all of your cores so you can still run other application at the same time.

If I convert only one file I only use about 70% of my 4 cores,
so I convert 3 files at once and all 4 cores are running at 100% !

Bill :)

[UlfLaursen]

Interesting. I get 67-72% utilization on all 4 cores both when I convert 1 and several files. If I f.ex. mark 50 files, right click and choose convert, it converts 4 files at a time, but the CPU util. is the same as when I just right click and convert a single file.

/Ulf

[Mr Bill]

Right clicking is the slowest way of converting the files.
Don't do that.


Drag the files onto the icon (like the pdf shows you) you should see an improvement.

make sure you're using 2.10

[Ron Evans]

Thanks Bill. Right click was the way I was doing it. Another case of reading the instruction carefully!!!! By dragging the file, CPU is now 100% on all cores, physical memory use has gone from 1.8G to 2.33G and disc use is now above 15MB and about 10% disc use. At this rate it will convert in less than realtime. It is working on one now so will let you know when its finished. I think Canopus should remove the right click as its of no use. Why would anyone want a slower encode?

Ron

[GrassValley_KH]

I think Canopus should remove the right click as its of no use. Why would anyone want a slower encode?

Perhaps not everyone has a system they can simply devote time to just encoding video? (with all available resources)