Real Time Full HD AVCHD Editing? The options?

[Erik Phairas]

Don't forget, Vegas will only edit AVCHD from a Sony Camera.

[Larry Horwitz]

Erik,

Vegas edits my Canon HF100 AVCHD just fine.

I also have been using the very recent update of the companion Vegas suite program DVD Architect 5.0a from earlier this month. It makes extremely fine, very quickly authored, menued (FINALLY!!) AVCHD disks directly importing Canon AVCHD clips with no re-rendering.

Larry

[Matt Headley]

This topic is a huge concern of mine also as I want to migrate towards this camera and I am a premiere fan and refuse to learn a new program just because there isn't a fantastic solution for editing avchd yet. I am constantly looking out for one though, and If I had to get all new equipment tomorrow, I'd probably choose the blackmagic intensity pro card that uses the hdmi inputs and records to the dvcpro hd format rather than going the fileconversion route.

[Larry Horwitz]

Matt,

I have not used it, but have read that the latest CS4 from Adobe now (finally) handles AVCHD. Perhaps this may be a good option for you if you want to stay with Premiere.

Larry

[Rob O'Day]

I'm trying to find some reviews of which motherboard would be best married to:
'Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550, Yorkfield Core, S775, 2.83 GHz'

I think I'll be going for that one as it suits my budget, but just completely confused as I haven't followed the computer scene for about 2 years :(
---------
Ignore that, looks like I'm gonna have to roll with i7 cpu.
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I STILL haven't had a chance to test out these editors as I've been out shooting bits, or editing older projects first.

[Larry Horwitz]

Rob,

I think it is very good news that you will be able to use the i7 Nehalem processor, as the prior (Penryn) family including the Q9550 you originally stated as well as the processor I use, the 9650, are considerably slower. In bechmarks I have been reading, for CPUs with the same clock speed, the Nehalem is up to 40% faster depending on which benchmark is used.

The new i7 chips with the fastest clock speeds are quite expensive but will be an outstanding chip for AVCHD work.

Are you building your own starting with motherboard, CPU, etc., or buying a read-to-use system?

Larry

[Harm Millaard]

I agree the i7 would be around minimum requirements for fluid AVCHD editing, but I would suggest to wait a couple of weeks/months until either BIOS updates are available or a new stepping of the CPU is available, since Intel admitted a SERIOUS TLB bug in the current stepping, that causes data corruption and or hangs. Bypassing the TLB by patching the BIOS seems the only solution for the time being, but it is unknown what performance hit that entails.

[Rob O'Day]

Originally Posted by Larry Horwitz

Rob,

I think it is very good news that you will be able to use the i7 Nehalem processor, as the prior (Penryn) family including the Q9550 you originally stated as well as the processor I use, the 9650, are considerably slower. In bechmarks I have been reading, for CPUs with the same clock speed, the Nehalem is up to 40% faster depending on which benchmark is used.

The new i7 chips with the fastest clock speeds are quite expensive but will be an outstanding chip for AVCHD work.

Are you building your own starting with motherboard, CPU, etc., or buying a read-to-use system?

Larry

As usual, I'll be constructing this myself.
I've pretty much got one in a shopping basket ready, but the price made me choke a bit :(
I'm going to purchase a Pantone Huey Pro, as I'm sick of all my monitors looking like crud !
And since I'll be getting a 24-30" monitor (as I dont have a proper TV at the moment), I want it to look correct.
I'll get the list up if you want but its likely to change if I can salvage a couple of parts from the old machine (graphics card/case/psu). But I'll update parts each month that require it once I'm in a new workplace.

Harm:
Appreciate the advice on that, as I don't know anything about these new CPU's currently.
Either way, the i7 is going to be performing a hell of a lot better than my 05 spec machine!

[Larry Horwitz]

Rob,

Given Harm's comment and the cost saving for the ancient (11 month old) 9550 and 9650 chips, these older CPUs may actually be a better choice at the moment. The i7 will no doubt rule once the issue is resolved.

All of this is a hidden expense which many AVCHD camcorder buyers discover only after getting their cameras home and using them.

This Christmas ahould thus create a surge of new quadcore buyers in early 2009.....

Larry

[Douglas Thigpen]

I've been using MainConcept Mpeg Pro 3 on Premiere CS3 for quite awhile and it works great.

[Mike Gunter]

Hi all,

This falls into the FWIW category...

I use Vegas 8 and Corel VideoStudio 12 (aka VideoStudio Pro X3), and now Adobe CS4 for AVCHD, but I also sometimes use TMPGEnc Xpress 4.0 to convert the AVCHD to high quality HDV 1920x1080 9-bit HDV that edits nicely in any of the NLEs.

If there is a quality hit, I can't see it. Naturally, whether that route has any appeal depends on what wants to do. Taking AVCHD to Blu-ray without any processing or even to DVD for Blu-ray playback is enticing and possible and certainly something this technique would belay, but I wanted to throw it out there for anyone interested for a low-cost technique to get into real time editing via transcoding to another CODEC.

My best,

Mike

[Rob O'Day]

Thanks Mike, hadn't considered that.

Also I know we can do proxy editing, but I haven't given it a shot yet.

[Mike Gunter]

Hi Rob,

Depending upon the tools in the shed, Procoder will make also do excellent transcodes, but you will need to batch rename the files' extensions from "mts" to "m2ts". It isn't onerous with a free utility called Renamer from [den4b] - Denis Kozlov. Renamer works in a few seconds to rename the files' extensions quickly, and Procoder 3, if you already have the program, can make good quality files. TMPGEnc Xpress 4.0 makes terrific files and is a bargain at $100US. I use it for a lot of projects. It can remove pull down from Canon's 24F mode from HDV during this process, too, so it does double duty for me.

But then by 24P content is done on 24P timelines which is a lot tidier.

My best,

Mike

[Pete Bauer]

I'll welcome any more detail that anyone has found, but after reading Harm's comments I spent a little time searching the internet on the topic of i7 errata. Best I can tell, the TLB issue is an erratum that Intel was aware of as far back as 2007 and resolved by a BIOS tweak. Words I read indicated that all mobo manufacturers would have had the erratum information and would have released their boards with appropriate BIOS.

Assuming that is all correct and complete info (again, best I could derive from about an hour of searching and reading but that doesn't make it definitive), any i7 system would be fully functional and published benchmarks would be representative. In other words, I didn't find anything that indicates future BIOS updates that would reduce performance in an i7 system are needed -- it was all handled before the launch of the i7.

If that's NOT correct, please throw the links at us...I'm itching to build an i7!

[Nick Bicanic]

ok...so I did some tests on the following

Vegas Timeline 1920x1080 - 23.976 progressive

I had three video tracks going.

Video track 1 had the MTS file straight from the camera (oh it was an HF10 shooting 24PF of course - it happened to be shooting cinema mode too but I'm more concerned with removing pulldown here than color) - so in this case vegas was attempting to do some kind of deinterlace on the fly.
(as we all know vegas is not able to detect/apply 3:2 pulldown to these MTS files)
This was my reference track - since I assumed it would look the worst.

Video track 2 was that same MTS file processed through TMPEnc 4.0 Xpress - I made very high bit rate MPEG2s.
Settings were as follows
Filters on clip - Deinterlace only (mode 24fps special animation, method: inverse pulldown)
Settings on output

MPEG-2 Transport (HDV HD2 mode)
MPEG-2 Video
MP@HL
1920x1080
1:1 pixels
23.976 frame rate
VBR - buffer size 224kB
DC component precision - 10 bit
Display mode - Progressive
Bitrate:
40000 kbit/s
Max - 60000 kbit/s
Min - 30000 kbit/s

Video track 3 - was the same MTS file processed through After Effects Professional CS4 - which correctly detected the pulldown - all I did with after effects was export an uncompressed AVI

My results were the following

Track 1 (predictably) - looked pretty bad - as far as progressive frames go at least
Track 2 looked ok (perhaps a little soft to the eye) but of course the system was massively more responsive (on a straight MTS files in vegas I can get 29.97 playback on single track files only Preview/Auto - as soon as I overlay more than one clip - my frame rate suffers - scrubbing is stuttery etc) - but on this track 2 alone I was happily scrubbing away etc etc
But when I looked at Track 3 I could see all the problems with the compression from track 2 - the images out of after effects looked excellent...

So my question to mike (or anyone else for that matter) is what the optimal settings are for TMPGEnc.

There are three reasons why converting via after effects is less than ideal

(well aside from actually having to own After Effects ;)

1. The files take up a huge amount of hard drive space
2. Uncompressed HD AVIs are a pain to work with in Vegas
3. You can't batch convert the files making any kind of long form workflow very very annoying

Even if After Effects was used just for removing the pulldown and I rendered to something other than uncompressed AVI to save space - it would still be annoying workflow.

(I am on a fairly old quad core setup - Q6600, Nvidia Geforce 8800 GT OC, XP 64, 4GB RAM - but it can happily motor along with 1920x1080 MPEG2's - although it does not like MTS files at all as I mentioned before. I have not tried Vegas 8.1 pro - which supposedly gives about 30% improvement in 64 bit)

FYI I did try Premiere Pro CS4 with those same MTS files - and the performance was junk...
and oddly there seemed no way to automatically remove the pulldown on the fly.

I apologise if this has all been covered in another thread but it didn't seem that way...

Nick