Submitted by dcbii on Wed, 12/08/2009 - 04:49

I was doing an evaluation of RevolverHD, and I have a couple of comments and some questions.

First, I think the 24-hour evaluation period is way too short. I did two burns and was attempting my final burn the very next day, but the evaluation period had expired. Frankly, that is just too short given that most of us are not full-time reviewers or something else that lets us evaluate a product all day. Many products allow 14 or 30 days, which is more reasonable.

Second, the 250MB limit should be a bit higher. I can understand not allowing a full-size DVD in an evaluation, but that amount of MB does not allow for more than about 1:30 of AVCHD video, and it's hard to test more than one clip, etc. to see how the discs actually play in the BD player. I needed to see if there were any issues with synchronization, stuttering, etc.

I was just using this to take AVCHD directly from a camera and put it on a disc, no iMovie or QT conversion involved. What I list below may be expected (or player dependent), but what I noticed when playing the short clips was the following:

1. No menu (not even a directory listing) for the AVCHD clips. It just looped between clip 1 and 2 (I couldn't do any more than that because of the size limitation). I spoke to the player manufacturer, and they said that AVCHD discs can have menus, and they were sure that the lack of one was an authoring issue.

2. The 'next' button on the BD remote did not work to go to the next clip. (This might be player related.)

3. I was allowed only 1 FF speed. Pressing FF again did go to the next clip. (This might also be player related.)

If I would eventually use this tool to archive AVCHD video to DVD or BD, I would want to be able to see a list of the clips as a basic menu, otherwise, I'd have to go through each clip to find what I'm looking for, and without the 'next' button functioning correctly, this would be even harder.

Needless to say further, the evaluation period and amount of burn allowed was completely insufficient (contrary to your FAQ) for allowing an evaluation that would let me know if this product would work for me.

Dave Barnhart

‹ Problems creating disk images RevolverHD for PC? ›

RevolverHD evaluation details

Submitted by justin on Wed, 12/08/2009 - 10:21.

RevolverHD is supposed to have a 30 day trial period, so we'll check on that.

We take your point about the trial limitation project size. We will increase this limit to 500Mb and also allow a few more burns.

As for the playback experience itself, AVCHD DVDs can have menus created, but we have not implemented that feature yet. So far, people have been using RevolverHD to string together a few clips together and burn them to DVD. This DVD then auto-plays the clips. We will look into a simple menu structure listing the clips for a future release.

The 'Next' and Fast forward functions are indeed player-related.

If you are interested in archiving your AVCHD movies, rather than burning playable high definition DVDs, you can use the Camera Archive function of RevolverHD. This creates a disk image file which can be loaded by iMovie or Final Cut as required. Note that AVCHD DVDs cannot be read by current Macs due to the filesystem type which they use (UDF 2.50). If you are looking for an archive solution, I actually think FlamingoHD is a better option. FlamingoHD keeps all of your content organised (using external drives if needed) ready to convert when you need it.

Thanks for taking the time to tell us what you found with RevolverHD.

RevolverHD evaluation

Submitted by dcbii on Thu, 13/08/2009 - 02:23.

Thanks for the response. I appreciate you taking the time and responding to some input.

On the disc menu, thanks for letting me know what is going on there. I was wondering what I should be doing to get the menu to appear, but you don't have many chances to get it wrong, and I didn't know if it was a player issue -- BD players are a lot less stable than DVD players (which I'm sure you know already)! And if you do add a menu for future releases, that would be great.

As to what I intended to do with Revolver:

1. Yes, I wanted one function to be playable archives of the clips. I was unaware that the Mac could not read back the file system afterwards.

2. Eventually, I did want to use iMovie to do some basic editing, and then re-export to AVCHD. Obviously, as you mention in your FAQ, there are problems there because of Apple's implementation. For those of my relatives who have a BD player, I wanted to be able to make them a disc with HD content, rather than downconverting to DVD format.

I'll take another look at Flamingo. I downloaded it, but I wasn't sure how I would use it, because I want my archives to be on discs (multiple copies) rather than just on HD, and I'd rather just leave the data from the camera in the original format.

What I was originally looking for when I found your site was a tool that could take the AVCHD file structure that was downloaded from the camera (in my case, it was about 50Gb after my first download), and split it into 4.7Gb size chunks (as closely as possible) that could be written to DVD in standard format (readable by computer), but also still retain the AVCHD directory structure that would allow the clips to be played on a BD player that can read DVDs of that type (mine can).

Thanks again, and I'll take another look at Flamingo.

AVCHD storage and editing

Submitted by justin on Fri, 14/08/2009 - 13:08.

I understand what you are trying to do with your AVCHD storage. Over the last two years at ShedWorx we've built up a huge amount of AVCHD content. Personally, I have been using an AVCHD camera since November 2006 and have about 200Gb of raw footage, all looked after with FlamingoHD.

I've also considered DVD storage of my AVCHD originals, but it just got too hard. Now with the low cost of external USB hard drives, I find the best way to run a library is to run FlamingoHD with its library on an external (portable in my case) hard disk. My hard disk is 250Gb and cost $99 (Australian). I recently backed this up to a second disk which I keep off-site, just in case.

With everything in FlamingoHD, I can send anything to iMovie or Final Cut for editing whenever I need to. I do this using VoltaicHD for straight conversions, or I can send a project to RevolverHD to make a Camera Archive, which iMovie can import from.

This workflow is good up until the editing movie is done. Now we can't create a true HD DVD. Final Cut Studio 7 can do this, but thats not accessible for the normal user.

We are currently working on a very simple edit capability which we will add into VoltaicHD, RevolverHD and FlamingoHD. This will simply be a trimming feature where you can set an in/out point for each AVCHD clip. You can then export the trimmed AVCHD files (with VoltaicHD), or burn the trimmed files to AVCHD DVD (using RevolverHD).

If all you need is simple trimming and joining, we'll have a solution in a couple of months.

Thanks for letting us know what you're trying to achieve. This helps us a great deal.