Affordable transcoding software?

[Chris Rippie]

Ive been editing an avchd project in vegas on a
duo core 3.0 ghz processor and 4 gigs of ram in xp.

For the most part until recently it would run the clips (1920x1080) at full frame rate
and at cut points drop a few frames for a few moments then go back up to 29.97.

These frame drops were driving me crazy never knowing how an edit exactly looked because it always slowed down so I decided to build a smokin new comp.


Just put it together a couple weeks ago..

i7 quad core 2.66ghz (overclocked to 4.2)
6 gigs of 1600 ram
Evga x58 MB
evga 260 216core video
64 bit vista

Granted my overclocking might not be nearly perfect yet, but
its incredibly disapointing that in vegas the avchd files are STILL
barely staying at full frame rate.

I was optimistically hoping id be at full frame rate AND get very good frame rates
with magic bullet on. Not even close.

Does this sound right that this power hungry format is still struggling with
this pretty dang high end comp?

Im very frustrated at this point and pretty much have resigned
to having to transcode all my footage and reedit it in format that isn't so power hungry.


I downloaded a trial of VASST upshift which converts to mpg2
which is definitely the least amount of resolution loss that ive seen.
But reading online people seem to say thats still a power hungry format and its not a
very bright solution. (the trial only lets you do 10 seconds at a time so its difficult to know
if an entire project will be power hungry)

Any good solutions that are affordable for the home user?
Whats the best format to transcode avchd files to edit in vegas?

I tried a trial of cineform awhile back and the picture quality was noticably
degraded to my eyes compared to the raw avchd file (both avi and mov)

Any help would be great
thanks

[Perrone Ford]

Vegas doesn't use the video card, so toss that performance right out. What kind of drives are you using in the machine?

[Chris Rippie]

Western Digital VelociRaptor WD3000GLFS 300GB 10000 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive

Its definitely not that :)

[Perrone Ford]

Originally Posted by Chris Rippie

Its definitely not that :)

You're right about that! :)

[Larry Horwitz]

Chris,

My next step would be to load the Windows Task Manager ---> Resource Monitor and look at how the cores are being loaded, how the disk I/O is being stressed, and how memory is being used. The bottleneck(s) should become more apparent.

If you are committed to transcoding, then my vote for the answer to your original question "Affordable transcoding software?" would be TMPG Express 4. Given the ultra-high performance of your hardware, it should not be neccesary to transcode in order to handle AVCHD. Is your complaint regarding the lack of full frame rate during preview?

Larry

[Chris Rippie]

Larry, thanks for the tip's. I'll look into trying to find out whats being stressed the most tomorrow morning.
My complaint is exactly as you say, lack of full frame rate during preview.
In Vegas im only on "preview" level.. half res.
I've tried my stock settings (not overclocked) 2.66 quad and
half the time im getting 15-25 frames, then other times im getting high 28's low 29's (not quite full)
I just dont get it personally.

The way it is now, its just become totally impossible to be creative.

Originally Posted by Larry Horwitz

Chris,

My next step would be to load the Windows Task Manager ---> Resource Monitor and look at how the cores are being loaded, how the disk I/O is being stressed, and how memory is being used. The bottleneck(s) should become more apparent.

If you are committed to transcoding, then my vote for the answer to your original question "Affordable transcoding software?" would be TMPG Express 4. Given the ultra-high performance of your hardware, it should not be neccesary to transcode in order to handle AVCHD. Is your complaint regarding the lack of full frame rate during preview?

Larry

[Larry Horwitz]

Have you tried using the tool which selectively pre-renders a portion of the timeline? It creates .avi files which will preview faster. There is also a dynamic RAM preview method.

Also, posting on the Vegas forum has been very effective to get great Vegas help. Many extremely knowledgable people.

[Bob Curnow]

There's also a setting in vegas to use 2 cores or 4 cores. Might be worth making sure it's set to 4.
Bob C

[Andy Olson]

Panasonic has a free AVCHD to DVCPROHD mxf conversion program if you are using the HMC150.

Using Vista might have something to do with it because it is very power hungry. Make sure to close down any unnecessary operations that Vista is running in the background.

Raylight AVI is another intermediate codec that you could try out.

Best,
Andy

[Chris Rippie]

In Vegas I have it set to 4 core and dynamic RAM preview is at max.
(if I play the same 20 seconds in the timeline over and over, by the 3rd-4th pass I get full frame rate on the cuts)

-----
Started testing While playing back a timeline and watching the resource monitor:

I stopped all the overclocking to do these tests (running quad 2.66)and it seems that the CPU never goes above 31% when playing back a timeline. So im guessing thats not the problem.

Physical memory is at 36% during playback

The only thing that seems to be a ton of activity is the hard drive.
In the resource monitor its showing a ton of vegas.exe's during playback (im assuming thats each separate clip and appears to be just that)
In that disk activity area there are files being read that I havent even opened in days.
Looking into this more I found out vista has a program called "superfetch" which guesses
what programs you want to open in the future and basicly reads them and gets them ready.
Well that sounded like a very good chance that was what was going on, but disabling that
I still dont get full frame rate.

I then opened up a new vegas project and just dropped 1 avchd file in it and cut it into
3 parts, so there wouldnt be a ton of clips running on the hard drive. Still not full playback.

----

[Chris Nielsen]

Do you only have one hard drive? If so, that's likely at least part of the problem.

You can pick up a second hard drive for fairly cheap. Look up the WD Black series, or a Seagate 7200.11 on Newegg or wherever you bought your new stuff. You can get a good drive for like $60. I'd suggest imaging your current drive to the new one (which would put Vista, your installed programs, and the system page file on that drive), and then using your nice fast 10k RPM drive for your movies.

[Chris Rippie]

hey chris, thanks for the reply.
I have 3 drives in this current computer.
The Raptor as my system
and 2 sata 3.0's 7200rpm

I put the sync'ed wav files on the non system drive
and the avchd video files on the raptor system drive.

I do understand what you're saying, but this morning I simply put one clip
in a vegas timeline and it couldnt play it back at full speed consistantly.

I dont see how a 10,000rpm drive couldnt handle that.

But anyway, that aside, before even this morning ive tried moving ALL the vegas files
to the other drives as well and it did not solve the problem in fact seemed worse so i moved
them back to the raptor.

I do notice people saying there are differences in sony's avchd codec and
canon's (i have the canon hf100 camera)
Even though its playing back almost fine in vegas could that be a problem?
i dunno.

[Larry Horwitz]

Chris...I posed this question earlier but only see this partial reply:

"In Vegas I have it set to 4 core and dynamic RAM preview is at max.
(if I play the same 20 seconds in the timeline over and over, by the 3rd-4th pass I get full frame rate on the cuts)"

Have you tried using the tool which selectively pre-renders a portion of the timeline? It creates .avi files which will preview faster.

[Chris Rippie]

larry, unless im not understanding what it does clearly,
thats not really an option for me.
I cant be constantly rendering, waiting the time while i edit for it to render, only to have to do
it on everytime i change things on the timeline.

Originally Posted by Larry Horwitz

Chris...I posed this question earlier but only see this partial reply:

"In Vegas I have it set to 4 core and dynamic RAM preview is at max.
(if I play the same 20 seconds in the timeline over and over, by the 3rd-4th pass I get full frame rate on the cuts)"

Have you tried using the tool which selectively pre-renders a portion of the timeline? It creates .avi files which will preview faster.

[Larry Horwitz]

Chris,

I own and use essentially all of the AVCHD editing programs and run a very fast Penryn QX9650 Extreme Quadcore and here is my take on what you are experiencing:

All of the AVCHD editors, if used to alter frames (as opposed to splice clips together and trim clips and do things which leave frames intact) are unable to preview anything close to real-time full-rez using existing general purpose computers. As an alternative, given the state of the current art, they can either:

1. Get a substantial boost from a hardware (PCI-Express card) device like Matrox makes for accelerating certain previews for HDV, at a cost of $1000+ for the board.

2. Create a smaller (as in lower resolution) proxy file for previewing, which will run at full frame rates.

3. Preview in full rez but at diminshed frame rates.

4. Require a "pre-rendering" step such as Vegas where the full rez and full frame rate subset of the movie can be seen, but only after a substantial waiting time for the "pre-rendering".

There is, to my knowledge, no "5th" option, but I will totally admit that an overclocked Nehalem i7 with a Raptor or uberfast SSD and DDR3 might pull this stunt off succesfully for full frame and full rez. If so, I may want to own one.......

For the time being, nobody, to my knowledge, makes the Matxrox-style hardware accelerator card which supports AVCHD, but Canonpus or others must be working on it. Perhaps such a card or cards do exist and I am unware of them. There are AJA / Kona cards supported by Vegas but they do not, to my knowledge, permit full rez full resolution preview, until the new clips have been rendered.

This is my view of how things work, and I certainly may be wrong, and it would be wonderful to hear of other people's experience to achieve true real-time nirvana with AVCHD. I know that the Matrox approach has numberous significant compromises, incidentally, most significant of which of which are the facts that it only has Matrox code to provide certain effects and filters and only works with a certain NLE (Adobe Premiere). Thus it is far from being a truly great solution for HDV, which has been around for over 5 years.....so I am doubtful that a breakthrough hardware board is imminent for AVCHD which is still essentially a comparatively recent consumer format. But who knows........CES is this week in Las Vegas and NAB isn't too far off either....... (-8


Larry