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MillimeterTest Drive: Affordable HD Formats, Part 1
Sep 8, 2008 12:00 PM, By Jan Ozer
Table 2: Comparative processing on an HP xw6400 workstation.
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Editing Responsive-ness
Because most of us have to actually edit the video that we shoot before we can charge our clients, I wanted to next focus on the editability of each format. I’ll note up front that this varies by editor. For example, Apple Final Cut Pro converts AVCHD to ProRes 422 during import, while editing HDV and DVCPRO HD natively. That neatly negates AVCHD’s inherent complexity. It was hard to get a true apples-to-apples comparison, but what I did find didn’t convince me that AVCHD would be extraordinarily more difficult to work with than either HDV or DVCPRO HD—at least if you had a very competent computer.
Before reaching this conclusion, I ran several tests on two eight-core HP workstations. On the HP xw6400—running Sony Vegas with the DVFilm Raylight MXF plug-in—I loaded two 15-second DVCPRO HD streams on the timeline, the top stream configured at 50-percent size. I then previewed the project and recorded the CPU load during preview on Window Task Manager.
Next, I added several effects to the top track, spinning the picture-in-picture 360 degrees from start to finish, while expanding from 50-percent to 100-percent resolution, and threw in a moving lens flare for good measure. Then I duplicated the tests for AVCHD and HDV. The results are shown in Table 2.
As you can see, DVCPRO HD actually required more horsepower to preview and took the longest to render, which was a surprise. Although AVCHD was harder to preview, it rendered about 10 percent faster than HDV, another surprise. None of the numbers were scary though, and the overall grouping was relatively close.
Table 3. Similar tests on an HP xw8400.
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Next, I ran a similar set of tests on an eight-core HP xw8400 workstation, focusing on the Adobe family of products. Premiere Pro CS3 doesn’t support AVCHD, so I ran AVCHD tests on a beta (but announced) version of Premiere Elements on the assumption that if the next version of Premiere Pro does support AVCHD, it will use the same codebase. I tested the other two formats in Premiere Pro CS3, because Premiere Elements doesn’t support MXF.
Although AVCHD proved least efficient in these tests, again the difference wasn’t exponential; AVCHD may be slower, but it won’t be like making the jump from DV to HDV. Now that we know the processing load is in the ballpark, let’s shift the focus to quality. Same bat time, same bat channel, two weeks hence.
