XAVCHD VS AVCHD
Mark at Village Voice offered this comment:
“I did study the advantages of XAVC compared to the AVCHD : let’s say that XAVC shoots @46/47mbps while the AVCHD goes down to 28. But I can’t see any difference (after comparing frame by frame for one entire evening). No difference even grading the colors (one is 10bit and the other 8bit). The difference is about the file size, and if you use catalyst prepare/browse (that nonsense mandatory to produce anything in XAVC) the size becomes ridiculous (5times bigger.. something like that). Broadcast was fine with the 35mbps of the EX1 and is fine with the 28mbps of the X70 in AVCHD. Unless you go live but in that case the output will be SDI , or interlaced.”
As a note, Mark’s assessment was based on comparing XAVC and AVCHD for HD output. This was before 4K was made available for the X70.
Now that 4K is available, use of XAVC is mandatory, so even if you’re still out-putting to HD–as most of us will be–the advantage becomes 400% greater information available in every frame. This should (and per reports does) improve your HD quality, but also it now allows you to crop any frame as much as 400% without any loss of quality–a real boon for editors.
The Video Whisperer 
Thanks, Also was considering the FX100 it also has 4:22 but a small 1/3rd censor compared to X70’s 1″. I saw your review of the X70 from a while ago and liked what you did. Which do you prefer X70 or FX100, for green screen work? thanks
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No idea! If it’s more expensive, it’s probably better.
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Thinking about purchasing the X70. I’m gonna do a lot of green screen so the X70’s 4:22 pull down caught my eye. I’ll be using FCPX and need to know how I can bring my footage in and edit it. Do I need a plug in etc.
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No worries. FCPX natively imports and opens up the AVC or XAVC files. Select ‘optimise’ on import so that you get edit-friendly uncompressed ProRes files.
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Can one use EditReady to process this type of file wrapper?
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Sorry, don’t know what ‘Edit ready’ is. Most NLE’s natively import AVCHD. Otherwise there are all sorts of solutions, including from Sony. I’d just Google it.
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Using the XVAC mode should I also use the DV mode for higher quality?
Thanks
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I use avid media composer to edit these XAVC-L files. Avid’s AMA architecture seems to work well enough to generate proxy media for the edit. I’ve dropped XAVC-L into Premiere 2014 and can edit with it natively but it’s sluggish in both NLEs with my first gen i7 system. 10-bit 4:2:2 should make a difference with VFX – particularly if you do green screen work. My x70 will arrive shortly – quite excited.
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Great. Keep us updated on the XAVC-L editing. Best regards, Joe
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sony released (yesterday) a new update for vegas 13 (444) that supposed to read the mxf files of the X70 but it doesn’t . it will read the xavc-l of x200 and fs7 but the x70 is still a mystery. sadly.
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One of the major reasons I’ve bought the Sony A5100 was XAVC-S. After reading your comment, I’ll give a try to compare AVCHD vs xAVC-S on my camera. Your review video about the Sony X70 is brilliantly eye opener. Take care, Miki
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Maybe you can try to ‘re-wrap’ the XAVCHD file to MOV with ‘Media Converter’ from cnet.com and adding the ‘AVCHD Uncompressed Audio” preset to it.
It helped me to get the AVCHD files into FCPro without having to convert the files. Re-wrapping them somehow gets them to work by just changing the file container.
Please try this with the XAVCHD and let me know how it goes.
Thank you,
and God bless you man.
Peace.
Ben Herrera.
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