josemourinho

A PC for editing AVC

I've bought a new HD video camera which records in AVCHD. When Ilooked at the Pinnacle editing software supplied with it, I readthat the minimum requirements include an Intel quad core processorrunning at 2.66GHz. I have consulted PC World, Dell and HP, andnone has a home computer running at this speed. What can I do?

Richard Cooke

JS:

 AVCHD is one of the high-definition movie standards used byBlu-ray and HD DVD and allows for pictures that are 1,920 x 1,080pixels. It is a highly compressed format, to save space, but as aconsequence it requires a great deal of processing power toreconstruct the original image. What the camera salesmen don't tellyou is that just displaying 25 of these large images a second isbeyond many PCs, unless they have accelerated graphics. Editingthem can be a nightmare, and a common approach (taken by Apple'sFinal Cut Pro, among others) is to transcode them into somethingthat is easier to handle. The

Wikipedia page on AVCHS