[kls]

Hi,

I've borrowed a Sony HDR-SR11 camera which I'm trying to use with Adobe Premiere. When the camera is hooked up via usb, the file format avchd is not readable by Premiere.

Does anyone have any codec/connectivity advice to help my camera talk to the computer so that I can capture?

I haven't done much video editing in the past 5 years so anything to help me get started is appreciated.

Thanks

 

[johnnydee]

I think you will need a more current version of Premiere to make it work.
There is conversion software that will allow you to convert AVCHD to something that non HD editing software can use!

John

 

[Chealion]

What version of Premiere are you using to start with?
Are you on an Intel or PowerPC Mac?

Converting AVCHD to another format (AIC or ProRes) is a very time intensive process - Apple's iMovie '08 and '09 can import the AVCHD footage and convert it to AIC (Apple Intermediate Codec) if you have an Intel computer. If you are using a PowerPC you can either use a general transcoding application like VisualHub or a program like VoltaicHD to convert it to a format that Premiere will handle. The biggest limitation you'll find is that if you're not on a Intel computer you'll find import times are approximately TWELVE times real time, whereas the solutions on the Intel side are faster depending on the processor in question. (A 3.06 Ghz iMac did it in just slightly faster than real time when I had a client's computer import 11 hours of footage).

 

[Amiga2000HD]

Oh, I can vouch for the slowness of transcoding AVCHD to uncompressed HD. A client of mine called to ask me if a Mac Pro FCP system was malfunctioning because it was so slow. This was the previous 8 core system clocked at 2.8 GHz with lots of RAM and an external RAID. The system was pegged out and it was performing the transcode a bit slower than real time.

I pointed out that going to uncompressed HD was probably saving some time over decompressing the AVCHD and then recompressing in to Pro Res 422. We ended up running a test clip - the AVCHD to ProRes was a bit slower than the AVCHD to uncompressed HD. Ultimately, since time was of the essence and the RAID was available, we decided that AVCHD to uncompressed HD was the way to go and my client had to budget the running time for the format conversion... I shudder to think at what the transcode times would look like on my home system (2.0 GHz G5 tower). I've never tried that on my own machine.