I swore I wouldn't keep picking away at this but you guys are setting an example!
To be honest I'd thought up to this point that the problem lay with the particular footage from the particular device (Panasonic GH1) especially as I've seen comments on the net that the GOP structure it produces is unusual.
However, some further tests now indicate that here at least, on my system, PD8 won't handle any video in this particular AVCHD format (1280x720 progressive 50fps).
What I did was to use another program to convert the original problem video (a series of real-world clips not the uploaded test) to the original format using that program's smart rendering. That proved that the conversion settings I used were the same as the original format (otherwise it wouldn't have smart rendered). The intermittent freezing of video when playing from one clip to the next in PD8 still happened when playing the resulting footage which isn't surprising as it ws essentially the same as the original having been smart rendered.
Then I took some full HD format AVCHD from another camcorder and using that other program converted it to the format of the problem clips (using the same settings that I'd just tested as being correct). The problem of intermittent freezing of video when playing from one clip to the next in PD8 still happened. (I should add that the conversion in the other program is from that program's timeline, creating one long clip. Then I use PD8's scene detection to break it down into the original clips again).
So that proves it's not the source but the particular format that gives trouble.
As a further test I tried to use the footage in that last test in its unconverted full HD format and it played without problems.
Next I took the original problem clips (1280 x 720) and put them through the other program's converter again, but this time with smart rendering switched off, to force a complete re-encode (which would be expected to remove anything non-standard from those clips). Once again, they would not play through without video freezing on the timeline.
Finally, I took the problem clips, and in the other program I shortened them at each end then smart rendered them to a new file, the idea being to exclude the possibility that there's some problem with the original start and / or end of the original clips. Again, in PD8, video freezes occurred with the resulting cut-down material.
So, it's clear that PD8, on this particular system at least and perhaps on some others, will not work happily with 1280x720 50fps progressive AVCHD, regardless of the source. YMMV. The fix is to convert to an intermediate format eg full HD mpeg2 and work with that. No other workaround (discounting shadow files) works every time (unless someone can come up with one!).
Anyone wanting more test footage can easily create it in the full version of the software I was using, which is quite often found on PCs and whose name has Roman associations. I'll let Dafydd have full details of the method offline.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at Aug 27. 2009 04:57