I was trying to do some frame accurate position in a video and came upon this anomaly. I was working with Canon 1920x1080 24Mbps source but could replicate the same issue with the basic sample file Boats.wmv. This issue is, if one “Produces” the video with an Nvidia card (GTX650) with “Hardware video encoder” selected on the “Produce” page with a M2TS container H.264, 1920x1080 24Mbps or even the 16Mbps profile, randomly PD13 produces what I’ll call a short duration clip. My simple test procedure to show the random anomaly is as follows:

1) NTSC timeline
2) Put 1 Boats.wmv in the timeline
3) Produce to H.264, M2TS container, 1920x1080, 24Mbps, United States (NTSC)
4) Select Edit, Produce and simply produce again changing nothing. I did this loop 20 times to show the random variability.

For the M2TS container, the results are shown in pic1. As you can see, repetitive “Produce” of the exact same timeline results in various duration of produced file. From the nearly correct 13:00 duration to 12:21, nearly 2.5% shorter. That’s rather significant when one needs duration accuracy. Also note out of these 20 loops of the identical “Produce” operation, only 4 produce operations are nearly correct at the original Boats.wmv duration of 13:01. So 20% of the time PD13 can render the Boats.wmv successfully to a H.264 M2TS container.

If the above is repeated for the MKV container, maintaining the exact same produce settings, PD13 consistently renders a 12:29 duration file. Pretty good results as shown in pic2.

If one does essentially the same steps as above but actually uses the “Create Disc” module to create a m2ts file within a BD file strcture with the same H.264, 1920x1080 24Mbps settings and enables the hardware video encoder during the “Create a folder” burn process and then loads all 20 of the created 00000.m2ts into the PD13 media library one notices that the duration are identical and all 13:01 as shown in pic3.

Bottom line, I’d say PD13 has some random anomaly in the “Produce” operation when a Nvidia GTX650 GPU is used with Hardware video encoder that makes frame accurate editing and positioning difficult. If I switch to CPU encoding or use a GTX950 or GTX970 the issue does not occur. Maybe it’s Kepler based GPU’s, 600, 700 series or maybe even more precisely the GK107 Kepler as in my GTX650 and PD13. Oddly, the “Create Disc” operation with Hardware video encoder” is always correct duration so it’s not just a GTX650 issue within PD13. To me looks like a PD13 "Produce" function issue.

PD13 V3130
Nvidia 355.82 driver although tried several recent releases
Win7/64

Same test in a Win10/64 with same GTX650 consistently produced the 12:21 duration for 40 tries of the M2TS container, no random correct durations of 13:00, why such short duration for this container during “Produce”, I’m unsure. Everything else with Win10/64 repeated as above.

Jeff