I was surprised today by the release of the latest incarnation of Apple’s video production suite, Final Cut Studio 3. The update was sudden and without warning, no mention of it graced the presentations at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference in June or the giant NAB (North American Broadcaster) show in Las Vegas the month before. Nevertheless, in these days of rapidly progressing digital media, the advancements found in the new programs are quite relevant to modern workflows. Tighter integration between editing and compositing programs is one major selling point of the suite, as well as greater automation to speed production. Apple added 5 new flavors to the already popular in house PRORES codec, from an offline quality to a full 4:4:4:4 finishing codec. I found everything I expected and more in the hundreds of upgrades, except for one thing: native AVCHD support.
For a few years now, consumer camcorders have been using a codec called AVCHD, an MPEG4-based compression scheme that has remarkable quality at quite a low data rate. In fact, the compression is twice as efficient as widely popular tape-based HDV, not to mention the resolution is an actual 1920x1080 pixels, compared to the 1440x1080 of HDV. First used as a strictly consumer format, AVCHD began to move its way up the ladder to prosumer and professional demographics when the data rate being recorded by the cameras surpassed that of other formats, such as HDV. Around 2008, Canon and Panasonic (as well as several others) offered cameras with a data rate of 24Mbps, nearly that of HDV at 25Mbps. Considering the efficiency of AVCHD compression, and the option of uncompressed audio, the new format became a viable option for those looking for an affordable way of recording HD programming.
Now that you know your history...
Final Cut Pro, the central editing component in Final Cut Studio is now in its 7th revision. It touts itself as a program that can handle nearly any type of video format with ease. Apparently not AVCHD. The Final Cut solution to AVCHD is to first convert to Apple’s PRORES. I’m not saying this is a bad thing. In fact, it’s probably what I would do myself if I had a camera that shot AVCHD. The reason for doing this is to ease the computer’s processor during editing. Because the codec is so compressed, the computer needs to work hard to uncompress the footage for editing, slowing down the work unless one has a sufficiently fast machine – compression is an entirely different topic I’ll have to cover at a different time, but you get the idea. AVCHD is fully supported in iMovie ’09, shipped free with every new Mac computer. All I’m asking is for the $1000 flagship video editing program to support it, should someone choose to edit natively. One instance I might find it useful would be quickly cutting together vacation footage or the like. PRORES takes a lot of hard drive space, not to mention time to convert. Hacking together a few shots to put up on YouTube shouldn't have to take long in the world’s most advanced editing software. Video editors have some of the most powerful computers on the planet, for some reason, I don’t think that a little extra processing power is going to be a big deal for most, especially if the projects are kept simple. For someone serious about video production, they understand what AVCHD is, know when to use it, and know when to encode to something different – a choice that countless iMovie users don’t even have.
Sony’s Vegas editing software has natively cut AVCHD footage for some time now, and as more and more cameras are being offered in the flavor, it’s only logical for other software manufacturers to follow suit. In the brand new MacBook Pro I purchased last month is an SD card slot. A large percentage of current camcorders record to cheap SD or SDHC cards, in you guessed it, AVCHD. It would seem logical for Apple to fully support the format they are fully aware of, as the expresscard slot was removed for the SD option. The top-of-the-line Sony EX-1 and EX-3 camcorders record to the Final Cut Pro supported XDCAM EX format, yet Apple removed the way to transfer the files by eliminating the expresscard slot in the 15” MacBook Pros. I’m not saying I don’t like my computer, but sometimes things seem a bit backwards. Maybe someone will realize this soon enough and offer a fix in the next Final Cut Pro update.
Next Time: SD cards, the future, and you.
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