Find out why your AVCHD camcorder has been given a breath of fresh air and which company to thank.
AVCHD (Advanced Video Codec, High Definition) camcorders started to appear roughly six months ago, and although we love the concept of hard drive based HD camcorders, the format has some serious drawbacks.
AVCHD camcorders may offer similar quality video to tape-based HDV (High Definition Video, a compressed form of 1080i) at half the bitrate; however our chief gripe was the lack of any video editing tools. That’s because AVCHD is very processor intensive and hence time-consuming for computers to work with, creating a system specification hurdle. Peel the name back and you’ll see that it’s really an implementation of MPEG-4 Part 10 H.264/AVC; a compression standard made for final output and broadcast -- not for footage acquisition or editing.
Until recently the solution provided by most manufacturers was to archive the data and wait for editing tools to become available. We've had to tip our hats to Canon for including custom (albeit rudimentary) AVCHD editing software with their HR10 camcorder.
With the release of Studio Plus 11, we are now able to properly congratulate Pinnacle for providing the first consumer non-linear editing suite we've seen that supports AVCHD footage. In addition to the usual tasks such as editing MiniDV-based HDV footage, it will also be able to burn its final render to HD-DVD. It also outputs to a variety of formats such as H.264 for iPod, PSP and DivX as well as the standard assortment of MPEG and AVI formats. No mention of Blu-ray, unfortunately.
It's priced at $169 and should be available in stores now. PC Authority will have a full review online in coming weeks.