motion jpeg compared directly with avchd lite on panasonic lumix cameras

AVCHD from the lumix cameras has several drawbacks imho. It is difficult to edit in most nle programs unless transcoding into avi, the compression leaves large areas such as grass patches rendered without detail and has a general overall soft quality. This sequence, directly shot to compare the quality of unadjusted clips from avchd and motion jpeg, looks at static and dynamic images, closeup and distant images to get a comprehensive view of the results. The two formats were assembled into a 1280 x 720 50fps timeline and exported as a mpeg4 file.
After the comprisons there are several minutes of motion jpeg to view the quality of the resulting output.
In a nutshell, for me the resulting image file might be larger, but edits directly in all nle, looks crisper and doesn't show the same pixelation and blockiness of the avchd footage.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• motion
• jpeg
• avchd
• panasonic
• lumix
• GH1
• GF1
• FZ38
• TZ7
• adlington
• marina
• mallard
• ducks
• canal

[Wardimus83]

what is a good editing programme for mjpeg?

[ghough12]

@Wardimus83 just about every nle supports mjpeg. I use sony vegas and premiere elements for most cases.

[Lolly111108]

Apologies, I just noticed your other videos where you did exactly that! You seem to know a lot about these formats, Which format do you suggest I should use for taking footage of concerts with the view of uploading them to youtube? and also taking memory into account? it would be very helpful thanks! I have a Panasonic Lumix TZ10

[ghough12]

@Lolly111108 For concerts i guess you want the best audio and the avchd scores here as it is a superior codec to the basic mjpeg. So i would say use avchd as you will get better memory usage as well.

[Lolly111108]

@ghough12 Thanks! One more question! Would there be much difference between the SH, L and H modes of AVCHD or are they all pretty similar? Thanks again, I've tried do do research of my own but I could never find anything very conclusive!

[ghough12]

@Lolly111108 Hi, the SH, H and L modes refer to the various maximum bit rates that thw camera codec uses in compressing the original video. In the best case the SH codec uses a maximum bit rate of 17Mbps the H gives 13Mbps and the L 7 Mbps. These give 30min, 40 min and 1hr per 4GB of memory. If you are using the video for playback on a TV then you may not see much difference between SH and H, depending upon the scene complexity. I will do a comparison video and upload it. Graham

[Lolly111108]

Just a suggestion, I think it would have been helpful for your comparison if you had taken some motion footage with AVCHD aswell, as you did with Jpeg, as someone who is researching what mode to use in concert situations it would be a lot more useful for me than stills, in any case, thanks for the video.

[SUPERCOCKROACH666]

thanks for the info!

[davidzof]

One thing I notice with the Motion JPEG is the large areas of background can show some unpleasant changes from frame to frame which get blurred with AVCHD, so in this respect AVCHD is a better format for films where the background is relatively static - esp. where you are using a tripod which really lets the Codec do its stuff.. MotionJPEG is better where you are handholding or panning or a lot of the scene is moving.

[ghough12]

@GerardFreeman No i rechecked the clip properties the 720p is the best video quality no macroblockiness and other mp4 artifacts. The mjpeg codec performs outstandingly even though the file sizes are quite large. Graham