Summer Project Video Experiment: HD Video on Mac (Part 1)

I'm working on my summer project, which basically is to learn as much about video as I can in 4 weeks. I did some research about video formats, codecs, commercial editing programs, online editing and free editing programs, video sharing sites, videocameras, and system requirements for working with video on both the Mac and PC. I compiled all the information over on my Coop's Word Wiki. Now I'm going to play with the 6 video cameras I own and talk about the process from shooting video to editing to posting the video online. I'll start with my best camera, the Panasonic HDC-SD5.

This is a full HD camcorder that shoots on SDHC cards. Those are just fancy Secure Digital cards. I have a 4GB and an 8GB card for this camera. It shoots in 1920x1080 HD in the AVCHD file format. The AVCHD file format is a nightmare right now. More on that later. But the video from this camera is beautiful on my 50" Plasma HD television. I love this camera.

So I shot some footage a few weeks ago while at Hawley Lake in the White Mountains, AZ. I'll use that footage for this experiment. I don't think I have many options for editing this footage on my PC unless I fork over the dough for one of the upgraded commercial packages I listed on my Video wiki page. Most of the trial packages don't provide support for AVCHD files. That's an upgrade, so I'll start with my MacBookPro.

The first thing I noticed is that iMovie HD doesn't support AVCHD files. How ironic is that - iMovie HD doesn't support HD? After doing a Google search I found a program, VoltaicHD, that would convert the AVCHD files to MOV files so I could then edit them in iMovie or Quicktime.They make a PC version of VoltaicHD as well and it only costs $30.

VoltaicHD lets you copy all your footage to your Mac, unplug your camera, then convert the footage while you (and your camera) go and do other things.

There's definitely some truth in that statement. It takes a long time for those files to be converted. On a 2.0 GHz MacBookPro with 2Gb of RAM, a 10 second AVCHD clip takes about 2 minutes to convert. Yes, it really takes that long. But the good thing is, you have to remove the SDHC card from the camera and use a card reader to get the files on the Mac, and you need to make sure it's a newer card reader because the old ones won't read the new SDHC cards.

One other thing to note is that the files are bigger after they are converted, so you have to be sure you have plenty of hard drive room. I only have a 80GB hard drive on my Mac, so I hook it up to an external hard drive. The converted output file will be about four times the size of the input. My first file was 11 seconds long and 17MB but the output file was 64MB.

I could use Final Cut Pro or Express to convert and edit these AVCHD files, but I'm trying to find affordable ways to make movies, and if you don't already have Final Cut, it's too expensive to go out and buy. FC Express is $200 and the Pro version is part of FC Studio which runs $1300. Ouch! Another option would be to upgrade to iLife '08 and iMovie '08 for $80, which is affordable but iMovie '08 is not worth the upgrade.

Once the files have been converted, the quality still looks pretty good. What happens is the AVCHD file is a highly compressed HD format and VoltaicHD uncompresses it into a Quicktime-friendly high definition format - HDV 1080i formatted Quicktime movie, encoded using the Apple Intermediate Codec (AIC). Now I can edit these files (MOV) in either iMovie HD or Quicktime Pro ($30). I opted for QT Pro first for ease of use. I can quickly trim off the beginning and end, edit out any pieces in the middle, and join files together into one movie. For more movie like effects like titles, transitions and a fancy theme, iMovie HD is the ticket. I created two movies on the Mac.

Deciding which output format to use can be confusing. You have to decide what you are going to be doing with the movie. If you plan to upload it to the internet, then be warned, most video sharing sites, especially YouTube, will compress your video into the FLV flash format. Your beautiful HD movie will look better than most on YouTube, but it will still look like crap. I tried out four video sharing sites that advertise HD uploads:

• Vimeo
  
• YouTube
• Dailymotion
• ViddYou

We'll take a look at the end result for each site and how I prepared my HD video for upload in my next post, so stay tuned. Making movies in HD takes time.