Hello,
I am planning to buy a Panasonic G2 camera. It records video in the AVHCD Lite format. I was wondering if any of you have experience with this camera or the format in connection with kdenlive?

Thanks,

Matthias

So, nobody has any info on this? Is kdenlive working with the usual AVHCD then at least. It's listed as experimental in the formats section but it seems people are using it successfully. Is the experimental status outdated then?

Hi matthias,
as AVCHD is highly compressed and complex, seeking is quite slow - so the statements here in this forum. To get high quality and fast seekable clips, most users here recommend to transcode AVCHD to lossless DNxHD for use in Kdenlive.

You should be fine if you have any tool which can transcode AVCHV or AVCHD light to a NLE-friendly format.

Cheers, Achim from HB

@matthias Unfortunately Panasonic, Canon, and Nikon have not yet decided to send us their newest cams for free for testing.

Generally AVCHD (H.264) is quite slow, especially for seeking or when applying transitions etc. But for some weeks it is playing smoothly on my Laptop (Core2Duo 2 GHz with an nVidia 7300 Go) on single videos (this was not at all the case before).

However with the next release this all won't be an issue anymore. j-b-m has been working on proxy clips, i.e. you can simply tell kdenlive to generate a proxy clip (e.g. in MPEG-2 with half resolution) for a clip in the project tree. This works really smoothly. I edited my whole Light Graffiti video using proxy clips. The original clips were H.264 in Full-HD, 24p. With proxy clips enabled: No longer seeking breaks, very smooth replay, just like the rendered video.

Simon

Hello,
thank you very much for your answers. So it seems the upshot is to transform the avchd files to some other hd format which can be more easily imported and used in kdenlive, at least until a new version can handle avchd better. Which tool to transcode would you suggest for doing this? I am using kubuntu 10.10.

Thanks,

Matthias

Hi matthias,

if you want to deal with AVCHD and help the kdenlive project, you can try the latest development snapshot using my testing repository ppa:sunab/kdenlive-svn

This way you could experiment a new feature advertised by Granjow in post#3 named proxy clips. Each time you add a video clip, Kdenlive crates a proxy file (downscaled and converted to mpeg2) used to display and seek smoothly. When time comes for render Kdenlive applies all editing to real files to generate the final video.

This afternoon I used this feature to edit a bunch of clips captured with my Sony NEX-5 DSLR (plain AVCHD).

To use proxy clips you have to go in the the Project Settings (in the Project menu).

Note : I've set up the kdenlive-svn repository to help Ubuntu users testing new features and reporting bugs.

sunab.