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David,
I'm sure the few users who have posted on this are not the only ones experiencing the problem. Although you and I represented the steps to reproduce the combing effect differently the net result appears to be identical. Cyberlink has accepted the steps and samples that I provided as a bug. My hope is that it also corrects the way you are reproducing the issue.
Personally I think a great deal of people don't even notice the issue or just think something weird happened in the video and go on. Hardware can also mask the problem so that might play into it as well. For example my video card has a deinterlacing mode that when enabled "almost" totally masks the problem.
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See this message:
http://forum.cyberlink.com/forum/posts/list/5718.page
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Smartfit isn't very smart. It will quickly switch to an LP render and cut the video frame size down as well as use a low bitrate. Since you can't adjust the compression settings when Producing you are stuck rending to file and creating a custom profile there. Doing that you can simply adjust the bitrate a little lower to make your content fit on a DVD. Simplest way to do this is create a copy of the DVD HQ profile and adjust that. Remember to save some room for menus. Once you have a file the size you need load it into a new project and produce the DVD selecting DVD HQ as the profile. SVRT should kick in and just copy your content to the DVD folder.
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Quote:
Check out my posting on page 1 of this thread, I have done exactly that with 2 screen captures.
Yes David, the result is the same as what I have experienced with trimming clips. Although it's a different function creating the problem (clip vs anti-shake) the result is the exact same. When it occurs after performing a trim, it can be corrected by adjusting the trim points in the clip until the problem goes away, but you have to go through a render / preview cycle with each trim adjustment keeping a watchful eye out for the interlacing effect. So to be fair, there is a work around, just a really time consuming work around.
David, if possible I think it would be beneficial for you to get a sample project and files to Cyberlink. PM Dafydd for the details on adding a report to the TRIM issue that he is pulling together.
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David,
I would love to see one of your rendered output files that exhibit this combing effect or even a screen capture of a frame showing it. I think you are describing the same issue that I've been trying to nail down for months. This post http://forum.cyberlink.com/forum/posts/list/4218.page#16115 has rendered examples that can be downloaded although I'm working on a more evident example now.
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Let me get this straight, you where editing the AVCHD file directly off the SD card? Yeah, that's not going to work very well. 
On the bright side, you now have some great hardware to knock those HD files out with.
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Thank you David. That will save me a LOT of time. Just wish support would have at least tried the very, very concise simple steps to reproduce the problem. Oh well, off to support I go.
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Can someone please test the Trim funtion on PD7 2519? Just add a single clip to a blank project, drag it to the timeline, click the trim button, move each slider some and click OK. I'm crashing every time regardless of the size or type of the source clip. Multi-Trim works fine. I just want to hear that it's working for someone else before I go through the chicken dance stock response I got from support.
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Didi,
The best way I have found to accomplish this is to "Produce" your video to an MPEG-2 file using a custom profile. Start the custom profile as a copy of the DVD HQ profile (all the other DVD profiles are small frame resolution and should be avoided). Adjust the bitrate setting in your custom profile until you get the output filesize that you are looking for. There are some online calculators for determining the approximate output filesize, but trial and error also works. Once you have a filesize that works for you, import that into a new project, set your chapters and then do a Create Disc. SRVT should kick in and you should end up with a DVD disc in no time.
One recommendation would be to split your work up into chapters so you end up with an MPEG file per chapter. If you then need to adjust the compression a little you can target one chapter or another. This will also allow you to cut content out of a capter to shorten it and not require a full movie rerender.
You said you are working on a 2 hour movie. That's going to be difficult to fit on a 4 GB DVD. One hour is standard and you can fit 1.5 hours without too much trouble but 2 hours is going to be difficult. Simplest answer would be to switch to 8 GB (dual layer) DVD's, otherwise if you work on the chapter approach you can easily split the movie across two discs.
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I think I've said my piece on AVCHD editing in a half dozen previous threads, but I thought I would add my name to the list. If you need more clips I can see what I can pull together.
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I second that. I used part of your process (produce to BD) and figured some out on my own. The final output was very high quality with reasonable compression.
- Import AVCHD clips into PD7 and save project files for each chapter
- Make all edits / changes needed on a per chapter basis
- Produce each chapter to BD format using the highest quality settings. Just chew up a ton of disk space but keep as much quality as possible.
- Down convert each chapters BD file to MPEG-2 DVD using FFMPEG. Getting the settings right for FFMPEG so PD7 would use SRVT was a nightmare as many of the output formats would cause PD7 to re-render the content causing quality degredation and bloated output. SRVT can be very finacky about the container of the MPEG stream and even the bitrate of the stream.
- Import the FFMPEG clips into a new PD7 project (each clip is now a DVD quality chapter). Add chapters to the project and create the final DVD using PD7's wonderful DVD menu builder. If done correctly, PD7 will just create VOB files out of your MPEG clips and layer on the DVD menu.
- I produce the final DVD to a disk file so I can use DVD burning software to create the final DVD's.
Doing things in chapters and ensuring that SRVT was utilized in the final DVD production was the only way I could control how much video I put on each DVD disk. I could then adjust the compression used on a per chapter basis to either fit those 10 extra minutes onto a disk or choose 4 GB or 8 GB DVD's.
I would recommend much of the same process to anyone doing a large project with or without using a 3rd party encoder for the MPEG-2 DVD production.
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pjc,
Yeah, I guess the "nice results" comment was reserved for what I saw from rendering 2 AVCHD clips (no SVRT) back to AVCHD. In my case, I'm using content from my Canon HF100. Sounds like PD7 likes the Canon clips better than others. I'll have to try some more clip because I could swear that some clips would render nicely while others were terrible. It might be the difference between content recorded as 24P, 30P and 60i, I really don't know.
I'm with you on the frustration of AVCHD support. I did a big 4 DVD project of a vacation with three hours of video and a two hour slide show using HD content from the HF100. That was so frustrating that I had to walk away from it for weeks at a time (constant random crashing, endless tweaking of settings / output format combinations, researching other software solutions, etc.). It took me 5 months, four applications and a dose of pixy dust to get it all done and the final quality could have been attained by using a good quality DV camera.
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You might want to take another look at AVCHD in release 2519. I just re-ran a couple quick tests and got very nice results.
- SVRT did work as long as I didn't touch the clips. Just drop a few clips and render.
- Performing trimming on a clip caused the clip to be rendered (the documentation says this will happen).
- AVCHD -> AVCHD (rendered) - I was not able to see a difference in quality. Very nice output.
- AVCHD -> MPEG-2 (DVDHQ) - I'm really not happy with the results of down converting to DVD (never have been). The result has sharp edges and looks very blocky. It's like the frame scaler is really bad.
So, when down converting to DVD I will continue to output to BD and down convert to DVD using FFMPEG. The difference is night and day.
<RANT>
I really wish we would quit getting features like GPU optimizations and just get rock solid encoding quality. In the end I don't care how fast it did the work if the output is only OK.
</END RANT>
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I thought you all found an easy fix for me, but I'm still getting the jerky motion even with the process affinity set to one cpu.
If you watch closely you will see the frames jump just as the previous picture has completely faded out. It never occurs during the fade, only when the fade is complete.
Looks like I need to dig around for 2227c.
PD7 ver 2519, Intel Quad Core, 64bit Vista, ATI Radeon HD 3850
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Those are excellent stills showing what MPEG compression looks like. The blurry blocks are from a high amount of MPEG compression. Did you try creating a custom AVCHD profile? I noticed that the max bitrate value in the standard profile is 25.8 Kbps, this is less than the bitrate of our cameras. I can't seem to find any detailed information on what all the settings are for or do so I haven't played much with custom profiles.
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I have high hopes for this software still. Cyberlink has been providing solid updates that have dramatically improved stability and functionality since it's initial release. If they continue, we will have a wonderful product for HD editing. For now, it works and it's good, but it could be great! I realize that the AVCHD format is cutting edge and that there would be teething issues with it. I knew that going in when I bought my camera. For now, I'll be keeping all of my original files in the hopes that soon I'll be able to render out edited versions in the full HD quality that my camera provided.
If you can post a small clip from your SD9, I'd be happy to do a little fiddling with it.
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I've been experimenting a LOT with SVRT, although only with Canon HF100 clips, and there seem to be a ton of factors that come into play if SVRT is used or not. Even when the SVRT window in the application says it's going to use SVRT on a clip it doesn't all the time. For those questioning - "how do you know if SVRT is used", it's obvious with HD video if you watch the speed of the rending. You can also watch your CPU utilization. With SVRT working, you get seconds of video rendered per actual second, instead of frames per second.
Have you tried a simple test with the SD9 clips. Just drop a single clip on a new project and render. This test consistently renders the HF100 clip using SVRT.
Whenever I trim an HF100 clip, SVRT goes nuts, but generally just doesn't work. If I don't trim anything from the beginning of the clip, that section will use SVRT, but none of the following trimmed clips.
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I started editing AVCHD clips on a similar machine (my sons machine) and basically gave up after a couple of days. Playback was so choppy that I couldn't tell what the clip really looked like. Using PD7 was less than satisfying, to say the least and render times where over night.
The problem with using a laptop for AVCHD is that you can't even upgrade the video card to improve playback.
How happy you are depends on your expectations and amount of video you are working with.
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I was having similar problems with PD7 when I first installed it. Sorry, I can't remember the version number. The software appeared to have some threading or memory issues as it would crash very randomly (sorry for the techno-speak, I'm a software developer myself). I got to the point where I would save my work constantly and before doing a Produce or Create Disk, I would shut-down PD and restart it, sometimes needing to reboot the machine. It was quite furstrating, but I learned how to save often and keep working.
Since installing 7.00.2206 I have had almost no crashes (although I haven't done alot of work on a really big project with it). If you haven't yet, I would recommend installing the latest release.
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After spending far too many hours on this, the issue very well may be the field order. JL, in the example of my workspace, both clips are from the same video file and PD7 sets the TV Format per video file, not per clip as setting it for one of my clips sets it for the other. In my example, the two clips were produced using the Multi Trim function from the same video file.
It seems that PD7 is having some trouble transitioning between the clips. Depending on where I set my start / stop frames on the two clips, I get different results. Sometimes I get good solid output. Other times the Interlaced output on the second clip, other times I get totally garbage output for the second clip. In all cases clip one is perfect.
SVRT is all over the place, generally only active for the first clip, then slowing to rendering speed on the second clip - even if I get the SRVT window to tell me that both clips will have no rendering.
PJC, could you test your HF100 file multi trimmed into a few small clips (varying the placement of the start / stop of those clips) to see if you get the same interlacing issues?
Oh yeah, as PJC suggested, I looked at my original .MTS files in various tools and the field order should be Top Field First, even though the TV Format dialog wants to suggest the use of BFF.
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