Need Advice: Preference Settings for AVCHD 1080/60i Source to Produce AVCHD 1080/60p

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Mergen

Newbie Joined: Nov 20, 2012 23:44 Messages: 20 Offline

Solved by

Nov 21, 2012 00:03

Dear experienced forum members,

I have a Canon Vixia HF M400 and shoot in 1080/60i MXP 24mbps mode. I intend to edit & produce 2 videos: AVCHD 1080/60p (for direct HDTV viewing) and MP4 720/60p (for computer viewing). I own PD 10 Ultra updated to 1703 patch.

Based on my PC specs (see signature below), I seek your advice in setting the following preference settings to obtain the best quality render:

1) Shadow Files: to enable or disable?
2) Hardware Acceleration: to enable or disable hardware decoding and AMD Stream Processing?
3) Optimum bit rate selection for the 2 videos

I'm concerned by feedback on this forum that PD renders poor quality AVCHD. Also, software rendering is superior to hardware acceleration. If Carl McMillan would give his advice, I would be grateful as he also uses Phenom II X4 processor and ATI card.

Thank you. Intel i7 3770 CPU
Asrock H77 Pro4/MVP Motherboard
16 GB Kingston DDR3 PC3-10600 1333Mhz RAM
EVGA GTX 660 Superclocked 2GB Video Card
Hitachi Deskstar 1TB 7200rpm SATA2 Harddisk
ANTEC EarthWatts 500W Power Supply
Windows 10 Home 64-bit OS

Carl312

Senior Contributor Location: Texas, USA Joined: Mar 16, 2010 20:11 Messages: 9090 Offline

Nov 22, 2012 20:12

Quote: Dear experienced forum members,

I have a Canon Vixia HF M400 and shoot in 1080/60i MXP 24mbps mode. I intend to edit & produce 2 videos: AVCHD 1080/60p (for direct HDTV viewing) and MP4 720/60p (for computer viewing). I own PD 10 Ultra updated to 1703 patch.

Based on my PC specs (see signature below), I seek your advice in setting the following preference settings to obtain the best quality render:

1) Shadow Files: to enable or disable?
2) Hardware Acceleration: to enable or disable hardware decoding and AMD Stream Processing?
3) Optimum bit rate selection for the 2 videos

I'm concerned by feedback on this forum that PD renders poor quality AVCHD. Also, software rendering is superior to hardware acceleration. If Carl McMillan would give his advice, I would be grateful as he also uses Phenom II X4 processor and ATI card.

Thank you.

Shadow Files: Disable
Hardware Acceleration: This is a try it and see. If you have good produced video with HA, then you would benefit from the extra speed. If you get artifacts in the the produced video, turn off HA. (I turn it off).

Optimum Bit Rate: Since your original video files are 24 Mbps, you can use the H.264 AVCHD 1920x1080 24Mbps profile.
Although the AVCHD 1920x1080p is very good, It is about 17 Mbps.

There is an new patch out for PowerDirector 10 build 2231 update
http://www.cyberlink.com/downloads/support/powerdirector-ultra/patches_en_US.html

I would update.

There is also a new driver for ATI/AMD: Catalyst 12.10.
It is a good driver, If your Hardware Acceleration was working before installing Catalyst 12.10, it will work after, if you install the 12.10 driver on top of your current video driver.

Thanks for the mention.

Carl312: Windows 10 64-bit 8 GB RAM,AMD Phenom II X4 965 3.4 GHz,ATI Radeon HD 5770 1GB,240GB SSD,two 1TB HDs.