How to Determine CODECs used by Camcorders Before Purchasing!

Report · Jul 28, 2018

I'm looking for a new Action CAM & was recently alarmed by Stev's revelation that the GoPro Hero 6 Black uses the H.265 CODEC which is not supported by PE!

I use Premier Elements 14 on a WIN 7 PC.

My current Camcorder is a Panasonic V727 (uses AVCHD).

I also have a DJI Phanton 3 Standard which usued MPEG-4.

Both work fine with PE14. I have also included video from a GoPro Hero 5 into my video.

I found a list of File Formats as supported by Premier Elements (15 to 10).

I'm not necessarily wanting to buy into the GoPro range as there are numerous other Action CAMs for occasional use.

But it seems difficult to find which CODEC each offering uses (so far only found that the Victure Action CAMs use H.264 which is OK).

I'd like to try to avoid buying a camera & then finding that the resulting video cannot be processed by PE14.

I've tried searching in Google with not much luck - any suggestions how to easily find which CODECs are used?

Or is H.265 so rare that only the latest GoPros use it?

Report · Jul 28, 2018

H.265 is still very rare in consumer cameras. There was a popular for video Samsung camera for awhile but Samsung quit the camera business. I've read the Panasonic GH5 includes it as an option. Another is certain DJI drones.

As near as I can tell, those cameras can be set to use H.264. If necessary, GoPro says Handbrake can fix it.

https://gopro.com/help/articles/how_to/how-to-convert-gopro-hevc-videos-to-h-264-using-handbrake

Report · Jul 28, 2018

Elements has supported H.264 for some years now

But its not just the codec but also can your machine handle these highly compressed files.

Report · Jul 29, 2018

I've had no serious problem processing H.264 files with PE14 on my WIN7 PC.

The worry was about possibly purchasing a new Action CAM & then finding it used H.265 (as per Steve's posting).

But its seems that the risk is low & converstion programs are available.

Report · Jul 29, 2018

Handbrake does an excellent job in converting. You can even make them lossless, but then again they are huge files.