AVCHD smartrendering doesn't work. Furthermore, AVCHD rendering does not preserve original material quality when outputting to AVC.

If you have a Canon, use the bundled Imagemixer 3SE v3 software, it smartrenders perfectly.

What a disappointment !
Thanks for the info, and unfortunately, I have a Sony camera; there was a SW bundled with it, but at the time, it did not work on Vista 64, so I threw it away; now there is a Vista 64 compatible upgrade, but you need the original CD...

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> Intel Core 2 Quad, 4 GB DDR2 RAM, Vista 64 bit, ATI Radeon HD 3850, Canon HF100

Quote: 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.

Nice results?

From what you said it means that SVRT only works if you don't edit the video (odd for an editing programme)
Creating DVD from AVCHD hasn't improved (I agree it is pretty awful).

And from my test there is no change in the poor AVCHD rendering.

Still no support for Panasonic AVCHD SVRT

My summary : no change since last patch.

@pjc: same here.
my guess is that as long as the AVCHD profile does not take more than the hardcoded 16mbps bitrates, it will HAVE to re-render.

my HG20 can output 1920x1080@24mbps and 17mbps, as well as 1440x1080@12mbps and 5mbps.

none of the samples above gets smart rendered, for some reason PD7 always renders even if i just place the clips on the timeline and hit produce...

HW CUDA acceleration is awesome, look what Elemental has done with Badaboom...if Cyberlink would only reach that quality level I mean come on, i render 1920x1080@17mbps "only" down to 16mbps and i see mpeg-like blockiness on dark surfaces...

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. Intel Core 2 Quad, 4 GB DDR2 RAM, Vista 64 bit, ATI Radeon HD 3850, Canon HF100

Hi William,

The last comment about the DV camera is spot on. I am reticent to produce DVDs of our trips for friends and family. When I put so much effort into producing a short film and it looks fantastic on my set-up (HD media player from HHD to plasma) then produce a DVD and on a nice upscaling DVD player attached to a similar screen it looks worse than my old Canon DV camcorder I get looks from the wife. The folks don't comment (I wonder whether they are being polite or just not noticing) but I cringe at the fuzzy footage when I know what it could be .

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. Intel Core 2 Quad, 4 GB DDR2 RAM, Vista 64 bit, ATI Radeon HD 3850, Canon HF100

Seems to be a recurring theme here.

i imported 2 clips on the timeline and clicked view->svrt info
selected NTSC/Mpeg4/1920x1080 and it shows everything as "blue" -> 100% video re-rendering.

no effects, no transitions, nothing...just 2 clips straight from the HG20.
1920x1080@17mbps.

i then clicked the "blue" svrt info portion on the timeline and clicked "check format". A window appeared with "Different file formats". The ONLY dissimilarity (marked with a "v") is Coding Parameters and this is why smartrendering doesn't work (at least in my case). I have no clue to what actually might be "different" in the coding parameters

Dimensions, bitrate, frame rate, field order are all OK.
Can anyone provide more insight on what these "CODING PARAMETERS" mean?

AVCHD is very complicated and there are heaps of parameters which can be adjusted depending on the profile.

Have a read here for an overview.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264/MPEG-4_AVC

yes, but this raises another question: do camcorder manufacturers implement AVCHD coding differently, or does the software (PD7) have problems with recognizing certain levels?

considering all the posts in this forum from different users with different camcorders (Sony, Panasonic, Canon) have something in common (SVRT doesn't work) it proves the problem is on Cyberlink's side correct?

maybe someone with a camera other than Canon can do the same test above and check if we can repro?

Hi Guys,

AVCHD is not really in my experience, I use a Sanyo HD1010 - outputs .mp4 files, but I came across this post :-
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?s=0b05695c2e47dc8f8a7686f8c66407fe&t=1112003

Whilst it's a tad long, it does illustrate the major issues with the implementation of AVCHD and the generalised difficulties in editing and dealing with AVCHD and also the moving goalposts for software like PD to keep up with.

I can't say whether it helps anyone but...

Cheers
Adrian


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