Importing 1080/50p AVCHD footage from Panasonic Lumix GH3 to Avid

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Importing 1080/50p AVCHD footage from Panasonic Lumix GH3 to Avid

The Panasonic GH3 once again focuses on video as much as photo performance. From the specs we can see that the new Lumix DSLR records at much higher bitrate video. AVCHD capture is now at up to 1080/50p. However, the big news is a QuickTime mode that records at 1080/24p, 1080/25p or 720/50p using an unusually high 72Mbit/s bit rate and all-intra compression. Unlike normal AVC compression, this describes each frame from scratch rather than updating areas that have changes since the last frame. It should give less compression artifacts than the heavily compressed AVCHD output from the GH2, particularly for fast-moving scenes. QuickTime 1080/50p capture is at 50Mbit/s, and while it doesn't use all-intra compression, it should still give better results than the GH2's 24Mbit/s maximum bit rate.



The 1080/50p shooting mode brings Full HD 1920x1080p video with best possible quality, but it could be a problem if you're working AVCHD footage in Avid Media Composer. Avid does not support the 50p footage. So far I am still not able to import the 1080/50p from my Panasonic DHC-TM900. But still the 50i AVCHD is very good to see on a 42 inch plasma screen.

Here's a solution for importing 1080/50p to Avid with the help of 3rd-party app Pavtube Media Magician, a nice camcorder assistant manager and AVCHD editor. When serving as an intermediate decoder, the software can convert 1080/50p AVCHD .mts/.m2ts video into Avid DNxHD .mov format, which is naturally supported by Avid Media Composer.

[JanetAbruzzi]

Thanks for the share