Posts Tagged “AVCHD”

One of the coolest little products I saw at CES was the Webbie HD camera from Sony. While I’m not a fan of the name (the manual calls it the Mobile HD Snap which is much better), this pocket sized tapeless cam shoots 30-frame HD video at either 720P or 1080P. It’s clearly targeted to those wanting to upload clips directly from the memory stick to YouTube. Even the name suggests that it captures web-quality video. But it DOES shoot in HD. So what’s the down side?  What’s the quality really like? Read the rest of this entry »

You may have noticed this ad on my sidebar for the Sony HD-RTG1.  I hand picked that ad because it seemed like a great semi-pro video camera.  It is reasonably priced, records HD video to a memory stick, and is small enough to fit in your pocket.  It might not be as professional as a higher end camera, but it seems like a good backup camera or b-camera.  Rob Kelly used it on a recent realty shoot to get extra footage.  The size and convenience makes it perfect to get shots that would otherwise be missed.

The video file format is AVCHD. How does that fit into a pro video producer/editor’s workflow?  It seems to be becoming the consumer format of choice for all the new cameras.  How do we deal with this footage?

On a recent outing Rob shot some footage for me with his HD-RTG1. The clips created have a .MTS extension.  With other video cameras you end up with a folder full of .AVI or .mpg clips.  But with AVCHD cameras you get an entire BDMV folder structure that looks suspiciously similar to that of a BluRay disc.  Just in case I needed it, I copied the whole directory structure to my drive. (well, mostly)

Lets define the rules of the game: Read the rest of this entry »