Comparing an AVCHD with Ninja recording

We have taken our camcorder, mounted it on a tripod and panned a scene that shows a medieval cathedral in the Gothic style. We first recorded the scene using the camera’s built-in AVCHD codec, and then repeated the panning movement, recording with the Atomos Ninja. Unfortunately, we could not shoot the two at the same time of day, so you will notice block errors and noise in the ProRes sample.

It’s important to know this is NOT due to the recording itself but the camera applying more gain and therefore making more noise visible. The elements that you need to focus on are the details of the Cathedral. It should be obvious those are better and more ‘quiet’ than with AVCHD.

At first we wanted to publish this comparison on YouTube, but a YouTube video has been transcoded to such a deplorable quality that it can’t show the difference properly. That is why I decided to upload the video in full resolution, in H.264 format without further transcoding. The resulting video is quite big, both in terms of frame size and file size (just under 100 MB), but you can download it here and judge for yourself how bad AVCHD is in contrast to the Ninja’s ProRes 422 HQ recording.

Please, do NOT try to stream this video clip by just clicking on the link below. Instead, right-click or control-click and save the clip to your local computer. When it’s been downloaded you can view it in your browser, QuickTime, or any other H.264 compatible player. Streaming will cost too much bandwidth and may result in me having to take down the link.

DOWNLOAD the videoclip HERE