AVCHD Tips - How to Play and Edit AVCHD (Lite) Videos?

AVCHD, as the most widely used shooting mode of different HD camera and camcorder , tips and reviews will be explored in this article for newbie who just step into this digital camera world.

Part I: Brief introduction of AVCHD (Lite)

AVCHD:

It stands for Advanced Video Codec High Definition, which is a format used for recording and playback of HD videos. Favorable comparisons of AVCHD against HDV and XDCAM EX solidified perception of AVCHD as a format acceptable for professional use.

For video compression, AVCHD users the MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 standard, supporting variety of standard, high definition, and stereoscopic video resolution. For audio compression, it supports both Dolby AC-3 and uncompressed linear PCM audio.

Features of AVCHD:

AVCHD includes many user-friendly features to improve media presentation: menu navigation, simple slide shows and subtitles. The menu navigation system is similar to DVD-video, allowing access to individual videos from a common intro screen. Slide shows are prepared from a sequence of AVC still frames, and can be accompanied by a background audio track. Subtitles are used in some camcorders to timestamp the recordings.

AVCHD Lite:

This AVCHD Lite is a subset of AVCHD format which is limited to 7201p60, 720p50 and 720p24, because of that, it's not quite as shart as "full HD" of 1080p or 1080i.The simplified compression makes AVCHD Lite easier work with using low-end hardware.

Features of AVCHD Lite:

Since the AVCHD Lite is the format 50p , which means that video recorded by the camera can be played back as a 50p signal or 50 updates per second. Since normally video is captured at 25 frames per second, using the 50p setting only means repeating evey frame twice, thus doubling the size of the video file even the output quality is very good.

Part II: How to convert AVCHD (Lite) to MP4, AVI, MOV, MKV, etc?

1.Pavtube MTS/M2TS Converter for Mac

Pavtube MTS/M2TS Converter for Mac,simple but good of the output quality of your AVCHD files for different output formats, you can trust on this converter. Detailed steps as below:

Step1: Download this converter on your Mac

The free version only has one difference compared to the retail version, which is the watermark in the middle of the converted files. Load your files by clicking "File">"Add Video/Audio" to load your files without any problem, you can highlight one to preview it.

Step2. Choose the format you want

Under the Format profile list, there are plenty of presets for you to choose. No matter you want to load your AVCHD files into NLEs like Adobe Premiere Pro, FCP, iMovie, etc or you want to put them on portable devices for enjoyment. You can always find the most suitable one for your purposes. If you want to make your AVCHD files become the most compatible one, then you can go for "HD Video">"H.264 HD Video (*.mp4)".

Step 3. Adjust your parameters if you need

If you want to downscale your file size for uploading online, then you can choose a smaller Bit rate, for this parameter determine the whole generated video size at the most degree.

Step 4. Start to convert AVCHD (Lite) to H.264 MP4

After setting the file location, just click the "Convert" to start your conversion. If you have lots of clips and want to join them together, just check all the files you want and click "Merge into one file" then you will get want you want.

2.Using free media player to convert your files

If you just want to do some simple conversion and don require too much on the converted video quality, then you can use some free player like VLC to realize this goal. How to use VLC to convert AVCHD files can be learned here.

Useful tips:

For more AVCHD (Lite) editing, playing, burning DVDs, check this AVCHD Column Page.

If you don't want do some edits before playback on your portable devices, you can click "Pencil" icon to go to the build-in editor UI and trim, crop, split the videos according to your needs.

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