You can cut on any I, B, or P frame. Put a 1 second clip on the timeline, you can cut it 30 times.

I tried it. Yes you can indeed cut anywhere. This must mess up the "I" and "P" patterns though. Now I understand why the media player glitches ever so slightly on the edits and while some hardware and software players can't play the MPEG Edit generated files at all.

I think whenever you make a cut an "I" frame is created at that point.

There may even be an explanation for the process used in the help topics included with the program.

Womble is not packeting the stream in HDV format, just the mpeg2ts transport stream that HDV uses. So I think it plays back fine in any media player that can handle the bit rate and is not restricted to HDV-only playback, like the cams.

The Sept 05 revision is far and away the most stable for seamless playback.

Yeah, the September version is by far the best. I also find that if I drop the Womble generated file on the Vegas timeline I can rerender it to M2T just fine and that file plays back well on any player. You could probably do the same thing in MPEG Edit by dropping the completed file back on a fresh MPEG Edit timeline and adding a null filter like a cropping filter with no crop so that MPEG edit would rerender the whole file in one go.

i've never seen a software or hardware player that failed to handle a womble-edited file... i've been working with it for at least two years now; everything works, including mpeg2 files edited for use on dvd's... it even edits ac3 audio with no problems.

if there is some software player issue specific to the hdv format, i wouldn't be able to comment on it, because i've never done that... i could not find any reference for hdv support on the womble website, but it would probably be a good idea to bring the subject up on the womble forum, see what the product engineer has to say about it... i bet that womble would include specific hdv support with a bit of prodding, they are incredibly good about releasing constant updates to their products.

re-rendering everything should be avoided at all costs, regardless of the format.