Let's talk AVCHD

Don,
I think you meant 4Gb of ram because 4Mb sure won't do it.

ok ya got me, heck only have eight fingers and two thuimbs to count on .. or is it ten fingers???

I recently bought a Canon HF S100, and it's recording in AVCHD, 60i h.264. It looks fantastic from the stream, but i'm having difficulty figuring out how I should upload it to pond 5. Any thoughts?

Converting it to mov... the only way to keep it looking good is to keep h.264 encoding. Any other encoding causes severe artifacting. Will pond 5 take h.264 mov files? They're very well optimized.

For comparison, a 1 minute 1080p 60i stream is about 300mbs.
Encoding to mov, Motion JPEG B - quality 85%, file size is about 120mbs, and nasty artifacts.
Encoding to mov, h.264 - quality 95%, file size is only 12mbs, with no real noticable loss.

I thought i'd mention that facebook takes that mov h.264 file and processes it perfectly, and ads an HD tag to it. I'm thinking this is the way to go for pond5?

don's computer runs of MB's of ram.

I convert my MKII's h.264 to an intermideate codec using Neo Scene.
It makes life easier as it converts to a 10 bit AVI video so it's much faster to edit in Windows.
Then I convert to quicktime format for upload.
I don't have any problems with artifacts using this workflow.

Jake

Aye, Jake is correct. My workflow is to convert to uncompressed AVI first for editing in Premiere or After Effects, then create the final MOV for upload. And my current camera is a couple years old, so the quality isn't nearly as good as the HF S100.

After doing a TON of research, I've decided to get the HF20 in a couple of weeks.

I use my HF100 with a Mac and Final Cut Pro. FCP ingests the AVC files into ProRes, and I can output in any codec I want from FCP or Compressor. I've had great results with that workflow, and its pretty easy. Although my attention has turned elsewhere (I still listen to the forums), I have uploaded h.264 to Pond5 in the past and they accepted it. I ultimately re-uploaded using MJPEG, though because I was told it was the thing to do.

Okay, they took my mov in h264 and priced it for me. seemed a bit high, wasn't going to price that high. set it to 10 bucks and checked the price for me option, and they went with what you see.

I like the idea of an intermediate codec like Jake says. Im going to try doing that intstead of eding directly in premiere, although in cs4 it didn't seem to be a problem.

What are your 10 bit avi> .mov convert settings like? I'm using premiere cs4 and it's adobe encode. is there a better way to transcode?

Pond5 took my file anyways, so you can see it here: https://www.pond5.com/nl/stock-footage/397280 Thoughts on quality? I'm not happy with the way it turned out particularly. There must be a better way to encode it like you guys said. Will keep playing!

Thanks
GX

Congrats glennxavier for the two experiments!