Editing HD footage

If you thought playing HD video on your PC could be demanding, wait until you try to edit it. As an increasing number of consumer cameras capture HD content, more of us are discovering this footage is a serious stumbling block for even the latest hardware configurations.

The biggest problems lie with the latest generations of camcorders and still cameras, which compress their footage into a variant of the Mpeg4 compressor such as H.264 or AVCHD. These formats are efficient at storing and transporting HD material, but they were never designed for editing.

AVCHD and H.264 are complex formats that require significant processing muscle just for smooth, linear playback, so it’s not surprising that editing them in a non-linear application is going to cause problems. If you try to edit these formats on most PCs, you’ll suffer from an infuriatingly choppy experience where precise editing points are almost impossible to set and smooth real-time previews are out of the question.

As discussed in the March 2009 Inside Information column, the traditional solution of throwing greater processing muscle at the problem just won’t work either ­ – yet. Today’s fastest processors, even coupled with stacks of Ram and quick Raid arrays, are still insufficient for delivering the kind of responsive editing experience with AVCHD and H.264 that we’ve become used to with Mini DV.

However, this doesn’t mean anyone who received an HD camera at Christmas has to wait for hardware to catch up before they can edit footage without tearing their hair out. The answer is to take inspiration from the pros and forget about trying to edit HD in a native acquisition format such as AVCHD. Instead convert it into something that’s more editing-friendly.

Intermediates
Professional video editors have long relied on intermediary formats, which accelerate the editing process and the speed of final export times. A separate program will convert existing files or perform the conversion during the captu ring process. The intermediary files are then dropped into the timeline of your editing application as normal. Some editing applications can even create the intermediary files for you.
The milder compression used by intermediary files means they will occupy more space on your hard disk, but the files are often dispensed with after the editing process anyway.