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Question

Why my PC cant handle AVCHD and my Camcorder & A57 Can?

Nov 8, 2012 6:43AM PST

Hi All,

I am new here and are after some help...

I have a E8400 Dual Core, W8 64 bit, 4 gig ram & 4000 series ATI Rad Graphics Card and a Canon HF 300 and Sony A57, both these cams video AVCHD format which my PC struggles to not only edit but to play smoothly. I have read many people advise people in these situations that a quad core PC is required with at least 8 gig of ram and a fast graphics card....
What I don't understand is that when I hook up either one of my cams to a mini hdmi to a HDTV the video playback is always super smooth and perfect, how is it these cameras have better playback internals than a pretty decent PC? Whats inside them that can make playback perfect but a PC which should have to my understanding a much more powerful processor and graphics card?

Discussion is locked

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Answer
Define "handle".
Nov 8, 2012 7:31AM PST

A long time ago I was editing and rendering DVDs on an Acer ter-600. That's a Pentium 3 with 256MB RAM and DVD renders took about 6 hours. It handled it just fine. Today you have to ask the folk what they mean by "handle"?

That is, some call it bad or not up to the task if the render is more than a few seconds.
Bob

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Re
Nov 8, 2012 8:55AM PST

Hello, handle as in play smooth in media players and handle as in edit AVCHD in either Adobe Premiere Elements or Vegas without the choppy playback.

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BD and HD playback went smooth here
Nov 9, 2012 1:36AM PST

At about the time of the Core 2 Duo and the Intel 4500MHD GMA. You would be hard pressed to find less than this in a laptop unless you were looking at netbooks.

Editing is/was fine but I don't own those titles so I have to go with what I saw at the trade shows. There will be situations where you apply a filter and no machine today will play without chop as the work is done in real-time but the rendered work is fine. I'm going to dismiss that since that's an edge case.
Bob