Whacky! Now I need to figure out where I read that. :-/ On the positive side, I see that MainConcept has announced that they'll finally be adding AVCHD smart-rendering (at some point--not specific) to their MPEG Pro HD plug-in for Premiere:

"General H.264/AVC Smart Rendering support is scheduled for an upcoming update."
(from Codec Suite: MainConcept)

Of course, the downside is that you pay another $200 or whatever. Grrr. But probably worth it.

Thanks for checking up on this, Kevin.

Best,
Aaron

No problem Aaron. Glad I could clarify the issue for you. The upgrade will be a good one for you. I say, go for it.

Ideas are similar to when HDV first came out
 

We have been editing native AVCHD for two years now on macs using both CS4 and now CS5. My older mac pro could handle the footage no problem up to 720p30. 1080p24 or higher were too complex to work with real-time. Our new mac pro has no problem with the 1080p footage however, so I think within the next few cpu upgrade cycles this will stop being an issue. We really like not waiting for an intermediate transcode and working the native files directly. The master encoded output to HD (or SD for DVD) has been fantastic for us.

When we previously used HDV, at first I tried using cineform all other intermediate transcodes because everyone was worried, but I soon started editing HDV native files without problems. I think the same is going to be true for AVCHD.

I suspect if you are working on a project for television or film and need to do a lot of keying work and effects, then a transcoded intermediate will be useful. But if you are just talking about basic editing and color correction and titles, working with the native AVCHD files seems fine in Adobe Premiere.

This. At present all versions of Adobe Premiere - Pro, CS-anything and Elements - will re-compress everything no matter what. The cause is that all output from those programs must go through the Adobe Media Encoder, which is the component that re-compresses everything (even standard- or low-deninition video).

Yes... I think my "wish" will be:

Adobe: Please just buy MainConcept instead of continuing to license the stripped-down "dumb-rendering" (mind if I invent that term?) versions of their codecs.

Oops! I wasn't supposed to tell everybody, was I? Now it won't come true... :*(

Best,
Aaron

If you could phrase that in the language of a feature request ("I request smart rendering for all formats") and then file it, you'll be more likely to get your wish. http://www.adobe.com/go/wish

I hope you guys don't mind that I'll be repeating this information often.

Sorry Aaron, I missed the part about smart rendering in the original post. I guess this would have to with output to blu ray and that kind of scenario. Are there any real world examples of how much the quality degrades? Since I encode avchd for web or dvd so I have not run into this. yet.

Certainly will do. :-)

Hi, Jeff:

Yep, it's encoding for Blu-ray. The appearance of the degredation is somewhat counterintuitive, and it really depends on what's in the shot. I do a lot of indoor shooting. In areas with lots of contrast, detail, etc., the degradation is actually not very noticeable at all (especially if I encode at a higher bitrate than the source material, e.g. 35Mbit, which I often do specifically to combat degradation). However, in areas of relatively little contrast, such as a wall in the background that has a very subtle luma/chroma gradient, the degradation can be very noticeable, especially on a large screen.

I attribute this to fundamental differences between the hardware AVCHD codec in the camera and a number of the software codecs like MainConcept as far as how gradients are dealt with. I think the camera's codec employs dithering very effectively, whereas MainConcept does not appear to apply dithering, or else does not do so very well. Consequently, banding that may have been cleverly hidden by the camera's codec stands out like a sore thumb after being recompressed.

That, at least, is my guess.

...and, unfortunately, as a mostly-indoors shooter, it's hard to avoid shooting walls, floors, and other things that really seem to bring this out. Video shot out of doors and in really good light is definitely less fragile.

Best,
Aaron

Thanks for the Feature Request Aaron! Good feedback on AVCHD issues too, thanks.