Transcoding AVCHD Takes Forever

[Denny Lajeunesse]

Originally Posted by Tim Lawrence

Hi Denny,

How can one tell if indexing is on?

Thanks,

TL

Right clck on your drives - properties - uncheck indexing. Apply to al folders and subfolders.

Then. Go to services and disable the indexing service. (services.msc or find it under administrative tools)

[Denny Lajeunesse]

Originally Posted by Stu Holmes

Interestng. OK here's a question : i've got a 5400rpm 500Gb internal drive on my laptop, and a 7200rpm 2Gb externakl drive. Up til now, i've had all editing projects 100% on the external 7200rpm drive. Media files, .veg file, renders too.

What does anyone think would be a more optimum setup? Have all files on the 7200rpm drive but render to the internal 5400rpm drive? I note the "reading and writing to the same drive will slow it to a crawl".

appreciate any comments on this stuff.

cheers

While that would seem to make sense, keep in mind that windows is on that 5400 drive and does a lot of memory caching to the same drive.

So.. I would still render onto he drive with the media. Stay away from the windows drive.

If you had two non system drives, then you could put the rendering on one and media on the other.

[Robert Young]

Originally Posted by Denny Lajeunesse

If you had two non system drives, then you could put the rendering on one and media on the other.

Denny is absolutely right- the proper setup for HD editing:
1) a System Drive (SATA 7200 rpm)
2) a "media" drive (usually RAID 0) and
3) an "export" and project drive (SATA 7200 rpm)

[Tim Lawrence]

The exact response from Cineform regarding this issue:

"we're aware of this issue. it is currently being worked on as a high priority fix. we were waiting for apple to release the api for the h.264 acceleration".

Interesting that they would sell their product without divulging this information on the website. They said that they do not give refunds. However, my opinion is that this is terrible customer service as they are basically selling something that they know has a "high priority" problem without telling you. Until they fix this "high priority" problem they should either stop selling the product or give refunds. Beware!

I hope you read this Cineform!!

[Robert Young]

I certainly appreciate your frustration. We have all shared it at one time or another.
But, current HD editing (AVCHD, for example) is still pretty cutting edge, and it's a fact that all of the major players- Adobe, Apple, Sony, as well as third party guys like CF, all are selling their latest software while simultaneoulsy working on many "high priority" issues in the background.
In some ways, it's been all beta, all the time for quite a while now. I know from reading these posts that FCP has several significant issues with AVCHD that are unresolved.
For my purposes, the closest I am seeing to a really finished product at present is Premiere Pro CS5 combined with high powered hardware, and it's taken Adobe a long time to get there.
The v.5 CF products do seem to be working very well with CS5.

[Ron Evans]

Edius Neo or Edius Pro 5.5 will edit native AVCHD just fine especially on an i720 machine. No special hardware. My Q9450 Quad core will edit a single track with no problem using Edius or Vegas Pro9. For multicam /multitrack editing I convert to Canopus HQ as this is easier on my PC but others with an i720 say several tracks native are no problem.

Ron Evans

[Robert Young]

Yeah... it's definitely happening.
With Premiere CS5 my Intel i7 + nVidea CUDA GPU can do multilayer native AVCHD with real time previewing.
My main point in the prior post was just that lots of folks are still having a variety of bumps in the road trying to do what they have in mind.
The real situation on the ground is often more complicated than the marketing/advertising materials indicate. I'm usually surprised when these things actually do work as advertised ;-)

[Robert Lane]

Another option I didn't see mentioned is ClipWrap; rather than transcoding it simply "re-wraps" the clip into a QT container that FCP - or other apps - can use. It can either just re-wrap into AVCHD, or transcode into DVCPRO-HD or Avid DNxHD. It's a powerful little helper and while not freeware is much faster than Log & Transfer on FCP.

[Alberto Blades]

has anyone tried a soft called hd stream tools? just downloaded it and seems quick transcoding, lets see