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Fast conversion from AVHCD hi-def to smaller format?
  • I use Premiere Pro CS5 for editing hi-def video. And even though my system's fairly robust (Phenom II quad core, 16 gig RAM, a GTX 670 card with lots of CUDA) it still chugs. I'd thought about taking my video files and rendering them as lower-resolution files, in another format, to enable Premiere Pro to handle things more easily. I figure, I could do my editing, and then replace the low-res files with the originals. (And then there'd be finer editing, color correction, etc.)

    Premiere Pro's renderer isn't exactly swift: it'd take twenty hours to render 2 hours of HD video into standard def. Is there a program that can render down a low-res version of an AVHCD file fairly quickly?

  • 6 Replies sorted by
  • You should be able to cut native AVCHD with your system. Did you enable CUDA for your card? http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/adobe-cs5-cuda-64-bit,2770-3.html

    If its still to slow I would suggest to recompress into free Cineform (Quality: Film 2)in Full Resolution: http://de.gopro.com/3d-cineform-studio-software-download/

    This codec runs really fast.

    For batch transcoding I use Adobe Media Encoder.

  • ffmpeg is fast, and you can do batch conversion with a script.

  • FFMPEG is great, there is also a version available called FFMBC (BroadCast) which support better intermediate codecs. If you dont like command line check this: http://www.stuudio.ee/anothergui/

    Sad thing: Neither ffmpeg nor ffmbc supports cineform.

  • Meierhans: CUDA is definitely enabled. I am going through the Tom's Hardware page and trying its tweaks and settings.

    I'll have a look at Cineform and FFMpeg. Main issue for me is conversion speed.

  • Meierhans: That guide from Tom's Hardware bore some fruit: I changed the NVIDIA setting for the multimonitor thing according to Tom's, and the problem seems to have been taken care of. (I'd never seen that particular tweak anywhere else.) Thanks for the heads-up on that!

  • Glad to hear it works with native avchd now.

    About transcoding speed: If need to do it for exchange with other people f.e. and you are happy with ProRes or DNxHD then AnotherGUI seems to be one of the fastest ways. It allows you to automaticly start multiple conversions in multiple cores, so you can really max out your CPU.