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 With the majority of consumer camcorders now boasting high definition frame sizes and convenient removable data storage all in a diminutive package, it's easy to see why us consumers are wowed by this new technology.
But what does it mean to those of us who aren't content with plugging the device straight into the TV to view our holiday clips?
I recently did some testing of HD video to see how easy it was to work with, and if the results were really worth the effort.
Now, personally I made a decision a few years ago to do my computing on a laptop. Spending my working day in front of a desktop PC, I wanted to be able to enjoy my computer-related hobbies at home, on a comfy sofa.
What has become obvious to me while editing consumer HD video is that my preferred hardware platform for editing is just not suitable for the task.
As an example, I tried to edit some MPEG4 video at 1280x720, not even 'full HD'. In Sony Vegas 8, I was able to get between 3 and 7 frames per second playback. Great.
I checked out a few of my favourite forums on the subject, and found that most of the knowledgeable folk there recommend a quad core processor to edit MPEG4 HD. Now while I have an issue with the unrealistic quoted system requirements for Vegas on Sony's website, a quick check on the Pinnacle website gave me a reality check ('Intel® Core™2 Quad 2.66 GHz or higher required for 1920x1080 AVCHD editing').
My laptop is not the newest, but it's no slouch. 1.73GHz Core2Duo with 2GB RAM is well up to the task of editing footage from my old DV camcorder, but MPEG4 (specifically AVCHD) is a whole different ball game.
The reason for this comes down to compression. If you check my article on video compression you will see that consumer HD formats are highly compressed, and the work required for a PC to decompress the video to work with it is far greater than for a less compressed format like DV or HDV (tape-based high definition).
The next step I took was to investigate workarounds. The trick, it seems is to adopt a method called 'Proxy Editing' which enables the editing software to use a less compressed version of your clips in the timeline, which is then substituted for the HD version only when it comes to the render.
I tested this in my two favourite software packages, Sony Vegas Pro and Serif Movieplus. In Vegas Pro, I used an excellent script I found which allows the user to select the proxy format. Great, I could edit in DV again! In Serif Movieplus, proxy editing is enabled by default when using HD clips, and renders a proxy file to WMV for timeline editing. Preview quality is not so great, but it is an automated process.
So, my laptop lives another day, and I can work with HD.
This still begs the question, could the camcorder manufacturers not have found a friendlier format for the new breed of camcorder? I guess the answer is that such a small percentage of camcorder users actually bother editing their footage, that it isn't really an issue for most people. I guess also that this is why DVD camcorders were so popular for a few years. |
