Hi Tony, James and all,
I now have the information you are looking for. FYI, the AVCHD problem was reported (well recorded at least) on May 15th of this year.
As I understand, there will be improvements to the AVCHD quality in version 8, but an improved version will come out later in the year. Here is the info from RD:
"For AVCHD quality issue, PDR8 has improved some what. But, it’s still not satisfying.
CT team has a plan to improve the quality. The plan is shooting for end of 2009.
For Canon HG20, the bitrate limitation is actually from AVCHD spec.
PDR7/8 currently supports AVCHD on DVD disc. Bitrate can’t exceed 18Mbps (yes, 17Mbps is to reserve some headroom for encoder rate control error tolerance).
We have planned PDR8 2nd GM to support output AVCHD on non-DVD disc.
This feature will allow bitrate upto 24Mbps."
I was informed the scheduled released of the above mentioned "2nd GM" is in late September or October.
Let me know if you have anymore questions. I will ask if the improvements will be added in a PDR 7 patch update as well.
David
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at Jul 12. 2009 21:17