Jake Ludington's Digital Lifestyle

"What is the difference between AVCHD and AVCHD Lite?"

As if things weren't confusing enough in the video recording world, the AVCHD video codec just got more confusing. AVCHD is commonly used in hard drive recording high definition cameras, as well as in most of the camcorders recording to SD cards. Panasonic now uses the AVCHD Lite "standard" as the video format for many of their digital cameras.

AVCHD Lite is a subset of AVCHD defined as devices using the codec at video resolutions up to 1280x720p. Generally this is going to mean any camera that uses AVCHD and records 1280x720 video will be referred to as an AVCHD Lite camera because it's unlikely that cameras will record AVCHD video at lower resolutions.

I refer to AVCHD Lite as a standard in quotation marks because AVCHD has clearly defined bitrates, resolutions and parameters that qualify as being AVCHD, while AVCHD LIte appears to be a marketing effort on the part of Panasonic to differentiate its digital cameras from the competition. What you really need to know is that any video editing application with support for AVCHD should also support AVCHD Lite without your needing to do anything differently.