I currently shoot HD video with a Canon
Vixia HF S10 digital camcorder (link goes to Canon's site). I shoot at the highest
quality available, MXP 24 Mbps (1920x1080). When I bring the video over to my
machine, it comes over as an .mts
file which is the AVCHD file format (link goes to Wikipedia article on the
format). I import these .mts files into Adobe Premiere (CS4). I import them
into a AVCHD 1080p30 (29.97) Sequence. I do my editing, adding title screens,
music, whatever. The problem comes when I go to export the final product into a
usable format. I've tried all different sorts of formats to export to and
I can't get any usable results. If I select, for instance, H.264 HDTV 1080p
29.97 High Quality (a preset within Premiere) the video comes out extremely
choppy...as in the audio will play and the video will hitch along and be mostly
out of sync dropping whole sections of the video as it tries to catch up.
My end goal is to be able to export two versions...a higher
quality (maybe burned to a DVD or Blu-Ray) and a lower quality (but still HD)
for uploading to YouTube/SmugMug.
Any help or thoughts you may have would be greatly
appreciated.
I use CS3 but perhaps describing what I do will help.
If I have a 1080 project and I want to put on YouTube I export as H.264, then select 720P, render out (MP4) and upload that to YouTube. That way people can select what quality they want to view it.
If I want to make my 1080 project as a DVD I render using the mpeg-DVD setting and multiplex the audio. I don't render in any quality lower than DVD MPEG2.
Choppy playback may have more to do with what player you are using. I switched to VLC and never have computer playback probs with HDV.
If you create your projects in HD, either 1080 (as you are doing) or 720, you always have the choice to produce high quality video for YouTube or regular SD video for DVD.
"H.264 HDTV 1080p 29.97 High Quality (a preset within Premiere) the video comes out extremely
choppy...as in the audio will play and the video will hitch along and be mostly
out of sync dropping whole sections of the video as it tries to catch up."
The video file is probably fine...the problemmaybe with the player, but it more than likely has to do with your computer specs. My H.264 1080p files from the Canon 7d never play back continuously on my cheaper AMD Athlon Dual Core, but would play back fine onthe suped up mac.
My suggestion is to just do a test upload to youtube. They will tweak it for optimal playback on computers through their interface.
Also, for playback on the web, 720p will do just fine and it's just easier to work with.