Hardware AVCHD render accelerators?
 

Anyone know of any AVCHD render accelerators that'll output at HD and work with a Sony Vegas (Windows) workflow? Preferably, I"d like to render straight to Vegas, but I can render to a lossless format first, then run it through the hardware.

I'm also thinking of picking up Badaboom, if it's any good.

Nothing which natively handles AVCHD out there yet, Brian.

Conversion from AVCHD to and from mpeg2 is a hardware accelerated option, but this assumes you also have a very fast HDV rendering platform so as to justify the time and cost of converting to and from HDV. What I mean is that converting from the slower AVCHD to the faster HDV rendering only makes sense if you can also do the conversions to and from HDV quickly and without image quality penalties.

Larry

Sorry, when I said "output at HD" I meant output at 720p or 1080p/i, not HDV.

I'm hoping to convert INTO AVCHD.

What I'm thinking is that I can get an NVidia card, get Badaboom, then render on a Vegas timeline to an uncompressed .avi file, then run that through Badaboom. Should save me time, theoretically.

Brian,

Just to clarify your need a bit further...

You apparently are using an HG20. I am assuming you would start with AVCHD content into Vegas. Is this correct?

If you are, then rendering out to AVI with Vegas and converting back to AVCHD using Cuda/NVidia is what you are looking to do?

Larry

Yep - the plan is to use vegas to export YUV AVIs at 1/4 size draft quality until I'm happy with the cut, apply effects, and render them at 1/4 size at draft quality to make sure I'm happy with the render, then export at full size best quality and use CUDA to render the final H.264 file for the Web, which is where 100% of my material is going right now.

Is your final web render going to be in a Quicktime or wmv format, a Flash FLV, or some other h.264 variant?

So far I've been rendering to MainConcept H.264 in an .mp4 container for home projects and WMV9 for work projects (WMV became a company standard for video before I joined up.)

Brian,

Given your desire / need to go to more than one output format, and especially your interest in using CUDA (as I do) to accelerate the rendering process in my nVidia hardware, I would very specifically encourage you to look at TMPG Express 4 latest version.

http://tmpgenc.pegasys-inc.com/en/product/te4xp.html


It has Mainconcept mp4 and wmf output from AVI, does a totally outstanding job of using the CUDA hardware, and also provides many other output (as well as input) formats you may ultimately find useful for web and other publishing as well. Unlike badaboom which has yet to really mature, this CUDA supported renderer is rock solid.

They have a free trial, and the real software is a bargain at $99 in my opinion.

Larry

It would sound like a plan, except that rendering out of Vegas uncompressed isn't that much faster then rendering directly to H.264. If there were any way to utilize CUDA -within- Vegas, it would probably be worth it - can TMPGenc be used as a Vegas plugin?

Hardware Mpeg 2 & H264 accelerated encoder /

FIRECODER Blu

Brian,

As I originally stated in my first reply, there is no hardware Vegas accelerator. You could use a hardware card to convert AVCHD to another format, and then possibly render it faster in Vegas or some other program afterwards, but the time budget is not neccessarily improved given the added step(s). Neither the Firecoder card or CUDA is supported by Vegas.

In my subsequent reply I chose an approach strictly based on the workflow you stated, using Vegas to render an intermediate AVI from AVCHD and then rendering to a web format.

If you want to do AVCHD quickly, then chose a program which supports 'smart rendering' which only renders portions of AVCHD where changes have been applied. (Vegas does not have such a feature.) Unfortunately these smart rendering programs (of which there are 5 for AVCHD) offer much less editing sophistication. Since your eventual web output is NOT AVCHD, they will be unlikely to gain you much of a speed improvement if any. If your basic issue is waiting time and slow speed, then the only present solution is to get a faster computer with adequate RAM, fast disk drives, etc.

Larry

vegas does, it just doesn't support avchd, unfortunately.

That's correct Jeff, and I wasn't specific enough. It would be better for me to state it:

"Vegas does not have such a feature for AVCHD."

Thanks,

Larry