How to use Elgato turbo.264 HD

Despite there being a wealth of solutions available for video file conversions, few come close to Elgato’s turbo.264 HD on the Mac. Colin Barrett explores conversion of AVCHD to 720p in this video tutorial.

Users of both Apple Macs and Windows PCs are spoilt for choice when it comes to available software solutions to the problem of converting awkward video file formats like AVCHD into something more manageable, but few applications come close to the quality and ease of use of this product from Mac software solutions company Elgato. The software enables you to convert your HD camcorder files to render them playable on a plethora of applications and devices – including iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad, PSP and many more. The whole interface is ideal for beginners thank to its easy-to-you interface and the resulting conversion quality is very good indeed.

We decided to give turbo.264 a test drive by assigning it the job of batch-converting a load of 1920×1080(50i) clip files shot with a Panasonic HDC-TM900 into 1280x720p format ready for editing on an Intel Apple Mac. In it, Colin provides a detailed glimpse into the inner workings of the application.

The product comes in both a software-only version and a hardware edition – thanks to the addition of a USB dongle designed to accelerate rendering and processing. In the tutorial, we look at the use of the hardware version.

Here’s a 720p HD video that was shot back in 2006 with a Panasonic HDC-SD1 AVCHD camcorder (the first such camcorder on the market) but not edited until fairly recently:

The clips were shot at 1440×1080 / 50i resolution onto SDHC memory card, imported into an Apple Intel iMac and edited in Premiere Pro CS4 at native resolution. The final edited file was then compressed to 720p using Elgato turbo.264 HD and the above video is the result.

For more inforation, visit the Elgato website.