The image is saturated almost completely at 17Mb/s. The reason there is less difference bewteen the top 2 is that the lens/sensor combo on consumer cams is not as good as "pro" cameras.
I assure you there are differences between the modes, but less so between the top 2 bitrate modes. How does these setting effect the quality of the video? I shot some test footage on all 5 modes but couldn't see much of a difference.įrom what I'm reading for basic Youtube or Vimeo content FXP should be good enough?Īlso what about the setting called Frame Rate which has 3 modes: The documentation isn't exactly clear as to how the different bit rates relate to picture quality. I have the exact same camera and exact same question. Tape costs are around $3 per 13GB (62 minutes), about 20% the cost of Level 6 flash ram. If you don't want to spend around $100 for a working supply of flash ram, consider an HDV camcorder instead. There is no good reason to shoot camcorder AVCHD under 1440x1080i 17 Mb/s unless you are low on flash ram capacity.
You need to pay up for enough level 6 flash cards to handle a trip, but the cost to archive at high quality is low and getting cheaper by the year. The good news is archive storage costs are way down vs. The same will be true for AVCHD recordings viewed 10 years from now.
Many justified shooting standard VHS or even EP mode because of tape cost. Even at the highest quality setting, there is significant artifacting to the recorded picture. Think of AVCHD as similar to S-VHS-C ten years ago. As HDTV processors improve, extra source bit rate will make a difference. Likewise, straight playback of AVCHD through a current technology Blu-Ray player gets mixed results for picture quality. Heavily compressed AVC video does not recompress well. crop, filter, edit, resize, color correct, format convert). The reason you want to shoot important home videos at the highest quality you can afford is at some point you will want to decompress and process the video (e.g. As I said above, 24Mb/s AVC is more appropriate for 1280x720p fps. Lower bitrates will take a huge quality hit. FXP mode at 1440x1080i gives about the same compression per pixel. Future HDTV display ? Are you drinking Moonshine again ? AVCHD is heavily compressed even at MXP 24Mb/s 1920x1080i mode. Even if you don't see much difference today it will make a difference on future HDTV displays.