My Experience on JVC GZ-HD7 Videos for Editing on Avid

I have been using Adobe Premiere Pro CS3 for years. Since my business starts with JVC Everio GZ-HD7 to shoot videos for wedding, sports events, promotional videos, how to videos for clients, Adobe Premiere CS3 is not my favorite then. It is a pity that CS3 does not support directly import JVC GZ-HD7 videos. I turned to Avid Liquid 7.2 as my preferred editing tool, as it supports the .m2t file. I just need to change the file extension from JVC .tod video to .m2t. Every video from JVC GZ-HD7 could be imported to Avid Liquid 7.

However, Avid made the Avid Liquid end-of-life announcement with upgrade offer to Media Composer 5 in March, 2010. I upgraded to MC5, but only to find that it does not recognize my JVC GZ-HD7 videos either in .tod, or .m2t. I use Aunsoft Video Converter as the JVC GZ-HD7 to Avid converter. This converter transcodes TOD/M2T to MOV, which is compatible to Avid MC 5. It keeps the high definition of the Full HD JVC GZ-HD7 in 1920x1080. There is also a quick option to merge videos on the main interface. It is the best solution I find so far for JVC videos to Avid MC 5.

However, I also notice that Media Composer converts the QuickTime MOV files to MXF as intermediate file. The conversion within Media Composer is fast, but the MXF file occupies a lot of space. For example, a short clip with 2 minutes at 1920x1080 is around 500MB, and the conversion to MOV with Aunsoft Video Converter reduces the file size to less than 200MB. After importing the output .mov to Media Composer, I find a file with .mxf extension for 2GB. It is a pity that Aunsoft Video Converter does not convert to Avid intermediate codec yet. However, if it supports the intermediate codec, I think the output file size will be extremely large like that in Media Composer.

After all, I could edit JVC GZ-HD7 video in high definition on Avid Media Composer, with the help of Aunsoft Video Converter. It is currently good for me.