Finally found a solution to the ability to playback Sanyo Xacti HD1000 1080i camera captures back on a PC. Its called the CoreAVC Codec. Next step is to test Premier CS4 with native Xacti HD h.264.
The CoreAVC High Definition H.264 video codec is widely
known as the world’s fastest and most efficient H.264
video software decoder. CoreAVC’s performance in playing
back H.264 video content is unsurpassed compared to other
software solutions and represents a continued commitment
from the CoreCodec development team to deliver the best
products in technlogy and multimedia.For further information and a detailed comparison, visit:
http://www.coreavc.com or for more infomation about
CoreCodec visit http://www.corecodec.com
It seems the latest Quicktime on the Mac has solved the dreaded GREEN SCREEN that one would see with the playback of 1080i Xacti streams. Now with both platforms, CPU power is the limiting factor as far as choppyness is concerned. No Problems on a Quad Core Duo or a Quad Core Mac Pro. The flavor of h.264 used by Sanyo is not a pure AVCHD but instead a flavor called QPixel. In Final Cut Pro, a direct import onto the time line of a 720p clip differs from the FCP H.264 Preset (quicktinme) by only the audio format which is 32bit floating point AAC vs Final Cuts closest preset which is 24bit floating point. There are no options to change this on Final Cut as far as I can tell without a modification in the registry I think and therfor I will always see a red line above imported 720p Xacti files in FCP. Anyways, a problem still exists when I try to render out a quicktime movie (Quicktime export) of the edited clipes in the default (autdetected) Quicktime settings. One will note that aside from the short Audio recompression (30bit to 24bit), Final Cut appears to render without rencoding the video–a goal if you want to preserve quality. However, sometimes the export will chunk on section that seems to have a defect in it (perhaps a glitch on the SD card resulting from a bad video to memory transfer) and sometimes the resulting render wont even open in quicktime! Hard resets of FCP are the only way out of these rendering freezes. If you note the position of the freeze and cut it out of the time line, the render will proceed through that point. Not consistant. So there is more research to do. I have had consistant results, however with Mpeg Stream Clip conversions prior to rendering but then I would just a well use HDV tape timewise.
