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Older hardware can struggle to decode h.264 in an editor.
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If your computer bits are a bit older, they may struggle editing h.264. Premiere has handled this without problems for the last several versions. How well the software handles this is only half the story. On my hardware, I don't have problems editing multiple tracks of high-bitrate h.264 video. I am an Adobe CC user with a few reasonably fast workstations. Every edit app that I have looked at handles h.264, but how well they handle it depends on the software and the hardware. "Yeah, but don't all video edit apps handle h.264?" More likely it will list AVCHD, AVCHD Pro, NXCAM, or AVCCAM. "The camera I use doesn't say anything about h.264." When it comes to consumer video cameras, photo/video cameras, and even many prosumer cameras, h.264 is king. If you have older hardware or an edit app that doesn't play nice with AVCHD, this will result in an increase in performance for your video editing app! In this tutorial you will learn how to transcode your footage to an intermediate codec.
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Depending on your editing platform and your computer hardware, editing with the footage that came off the camera may result in performance issues.
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