Damian,

Hope things are well.

Just had some questions for you re: your apparent guruness of video editing.

I recently picked up a Canon HF100 (naturally they just released new cameras with a better bitrate). As you probably know, it's using AVCHD as its format, which, as I am finding out, is a pain due to a general lack of support.

How familiar are you with this format? I've taken some general vids of nothing in particular and have tried several methods of conversion, from Quicktime to AVIs to WMVs and they all look less than spectacular from the original. I've keep the size the same (1920x1080) and also down converted to 720p; both using various bit rates for recompression, various frame rates and codecs. Some end up being a few hundred MB larger...one I did over the weekend somehow ended up being 24GB from a 2 min video. Its bit rate was something on the order of 1.4Gbps. I have no idea what I used to get that.

On top of that, I get a horrible interlacing effect on some methods.



So, what would you recommend (both in software and in choice of codec), if anything, to convert it to a format that's more widely used, somewhat smaller (I suppose 640x480 is OK too), but retains as much quality as possible. The goal is to start taking as much in car footage as possible as well as other fast moving exterior shots.

The original video looks great, but that conversion is killing me...and my PC (I've almost finished w/ a quad core, as an old dual core AMD isn't coming close to cutting it).

Thanks in advance!

Christian

PS...

Any other video gurus...this can go to you too. I'm all for suggestions.

 

No one?