Jason Dunn
03-11-2010, 10:00 PM
<p><em>"AVCHD from the Lumix cameras has several drawbacks IMHO. It is difficult to edit in most NLE programs unless transcoding into AVI, the compression leaves large areas such as grass patches rendered without detail and has a general overall soft quality. This sequence, directly shot to compare the quality of unadjusted clips from AVCHD and MJPEG, looks at static and dynamic images, closeup and distant images to get a comprehensive view of the results. The two formats were assembled into a 1280 x 720 50fps timeline and exported as a mpeg4 file."</em></p><p><object width="600" height="360" data="http://www.youtube.com/v/9U0oHQVCwdw&ap=%26fmt=18" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"><param name="src" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/9U0oHQVCwdw&ap=%26fmt=18" /></object></p><p>I generally set my Panasonic cameras to record in AVCHD, but after watching this video and thinking about how I use the video clips, I'm going to change my cameras to use MJPEG. I tend to edit all my video clips, so for me it makes sense to capture clips with as little compression as possible - and that means MJPEG. I have 16 GB cards in my cameras, and haven't come close to running out of space yet, so I'm not concerned with the added storage MJPEG takes up. If you're someone that tends not to edit your clips and just saves them as-is, AVCHD might make more sense. What video format do you use on your digital camera?</p>