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I've got Ulead Video Studio, and was able to do some basic editing in it on my HDC-SD3 AVCHD footage.

Currently I'm working on putting together a Vacation Road Trip DVD that's going to be around 1 hour long. I want to add various effects to it (mostly nice title effects), like in the video below:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJN1iXQc ... re=related

To that end I purchased Adobe After Effects CS3 (PC version). Now the problem is that After Effects can't process AVCHD natively.

1. So my question to you is, what should I transcode the AVCHD into in order for me to be able to work with it in After Effects, and end up with footage that's not degraded in quality?

2. Also, after I'm done with processing some parts of the footage in After Effects - will I be able to transcode it back into AVCHD, so it matches other pieces that didn't need editing, and I can finish my DVD using Ulead Video Studio?

I see no responses. Let me ask a more basic question then. What format should I convert my raw AVCHD files into, without losing any quality?

Your native clips are HD. Since, as you say, After Effects can't handle AVCHD you would need to convert them to either AVI or MPEG-2. Since neither of these are HD, you will have already compromised they quality.

If it were me I would go the AVI route, since it is not as lossy a format as MPEG-2 is. And I say AVI, not DV-AVI because I also use third party software for effects (Digital Juice) and their effects must be rendered to uncompressed AVI. They produce large files (60 GB/hr) but the clips are very short. I don't know what AE might require.

Just let me say that I do not use AVCHD or After Effects so this is all just speculation on my part.

Thanks for the fast response. Let me ask you another question - assuming my ultimate goal would be rendering to a regular DVD (as opposed to Blu-ray). Do I even need to worry about the loss of quality going to avi?

This entire topic is really out of my realm of knowledge, and would be better answered by others, notably Ken Berry. He has made what he calls hybrid discs, essentially AVCHD on regular DVDs. You may want to try a search on the subject.

I would fill in your system specs and read these tutorials: Accessible from the main web page
http://phpbb.ulead.com.tw/EN/viewforum. ... b820c8bcc1

If you are going to make an SD dvd-video disc, then dv.avi is the way to go with after effects.
If you want to make a HD video on a standard dvd disc then you may want to look at any plugins for after effects, or maybe check out cineform who may do some conversion tool.

Hi,
I've never created a dv.avi from avchd, only sd-mpeg2 or hd-mpeg2 files,
but if the OP goes with dv.avi doesn't the adobe products have a preference for DV.AVI - Type2 ?