CS5 and AVCHD support: Worth the move?

[Robert Young]

I don't know what your problem is with Encore.
I've authored & burned lots of Blu Ray disks on both Encore CS4 and CS5, mpg and h.264, with no difficulty at all. I've not really heard of others with problems in this regard either, so I don't think its a generic issue with Encore. More likely a specific problem with your system or workflow.

[Bruce Watson]

Originally Posted by Aaron Holmes

The only scenario I can imagine where using a proxy format would have an impact on quality would be where one renders one's whole project, then loads the result (e.g., into another program) for still more work. Is there another scenario? I'd love a technical explanation.

Alas, I'm not the guy to give it to you. I don't know the internals for the Production Premium suite.

It does look as if Premiere Pro does not constantly re-encode and restore the files. It looks as if there is a single copy of the original file, and what Adobe stores is difference files. IDK for sure. It also looks as if importing a file from Premiere Pro into Encore via Adobe Dynamic Link does something similar -- that is, Encore looks at the original file and the difference files in the PPro directories. Again, IDK. And I have no idea how After Effects handles files.

I too would like to know how the files are handled in the suite and by the individual programs. But for the next month or two I'm just going to have to live with less understanding than I might like.

[Randy Johnson]

Id like to jump in with a question, I have a i-7 920 and 6 gigs of memory when I play AVCHD video it plays fine but when I start to scrub around it gets clunky. Especially when I I do a multi-cam switch. Is there a minimum processor I should shoot for for? I dont do a lot of effects so I dont think a better video card will help. Right now I can get a good deal on a -7 950 would that help?

[David Beisner]

I have a 3DBOXX system with an i7 920 processor and 12 GB of Ram and am still running CS4 (hopefully upgrading next month). AVCHD just simply plays clunky on the timeline, regardless of what I do. From what I've read, I'm thinking jumping to the 950 won't really help matters at all--I'm hoping the CS5 Mercury engine will help out, but I frankly don't care that much--my rendered output from Media Encoder is great and I can live with clunky in the timeline as long as I know my output is going to be clean.

[Randy Johnson]

From what ive read the MPE will only help you with effects if your doing cuts & dissolves it does contribute at all. All it does is let the video card handle the effects processing.

[Robert Young]

Originally Posted by Randy Johnson

From what ive read the MPE will only help you with effects if your doing cuts & dissolves it does contribute at all. All it does is let the video card handle the effects processing.

I believe that is true.
It is still your CPU and RAM that are decompressing and processing the AVCHD files.
AVCHD is RAM hungry.
I think you can get good performance with an 8 core CPU, but increasing RAM from 6GB to 12-16GB should provide a significant improvement in Premiere CS5's ability to handle AVCHD.
Adobe really does recommend 8+ cores, 12+GB RAM, approved CUDA GPU to get the full performance that CS5 is designed for.
Dave's situation is a little different- he has the hardware, but needs CS5 to get the performance. CS4 is 32 bit, CS5 is 64 bit and it makes a huge difference.

[Randy Johnson]

When you say 8 cores do you mean a 2 quad core system or a quad core with hyperthreading?

[Robert Young]

Sorry- I should have been more specific.
I mean an Intel i7

[Jay West]

"If somebody can tell me that Encore CS5 can import an hour-long AVC .m2ts file at, say, 24-ish Mbit/s (and, for bonus points, the peak memory usage of Encore during import), I would be enormously appreciative."

While I have never tried to pull AVCHD directly into Encore, I have brought 2+ hour 24Mbps AVCHD (from an Sony NX5) into PPro CS5, added a beginning title with fades and dissolves at the beginning and end of the video, and then used Dynamic Link to export to Encore CS5. No problems at all.

I'm running an I7-920, 12 g of RAM, GTX260 (MPE hardware acceleration), with the AVCHD video fed from a GSpeed 4 TB Raid and the Blur-Ray directory on a separate 1 TB Raid 0. I run the 64 bit CS5 under Win 7. Working with one or two tracks of AVCHD under CS5 has been like working with DV used to be, as Robert mentioned above.

I've only looked at memory usage once or twice during export to Encore and it was negligible.

But, are you asking about importing or are you asking about encoding? The encoding and disk imaging are a different matter. Encoding tends to max out memory usage. As I understand it --- and somebody doubtless will correct me if I'm wrong --- CS5 basically is set to use up to something like 75% of available memory when it needs it. This is true whether you have 6 g, 12 g or 24 g of RAM.

While a CS5 upgrade ($299) might fix your problems, the workflow and hardware you describe suggest you might be happier with Edius Neo ($199). There's a trial version at Grass Valley Home | Grass Valley.

[Aaron Holmes]

Originally Posted by Jay West

While I have never tried to pull AVCHD directly into Encore, I have brought 2+ hour 24Mbps AVCHD (from an Sony NX5) into PPro CS5, added a beginning title with fades and dissolves at the beginning and end of the video, and then used Dynamic Link to export to Encore CS5. No problems at all.

Thanks, Jay. Yep, this works for me also. I'm only dead if I try to import a ready-made 30+ minute program as a single, monolithic AVCHD file (e.g., m2ts). File could originate from AME, VideoStudio, whatever. In this case, simply trying to import the file as an asset/timeline usually fails, and if it doesn't, then building a disc image with that asset later will. Demuxing the file first seems to dodge the import issue, but building a disc image still fails. The failure in both cases is either an outright crash or, more often, a debug message originating from the HDMV handling code that asks me to report the problem to Adobe.

Originally Posted by Jay West

While a CS5 upgrade ($299) might fix your problems, the workflow and hardware you describe suggest you might be happier with Edius Neo ($199). There's a trial version at Grass Valley Home | Grass Valley.

I've been playing with the Edius 5 trial the last few days and the performance is amazing. ...well, actually, it's the kind of performance I'd expect from a Quad-core machine with 4Gb of memory. ;-)

Best,
Aaron

[Kevin Monahan]

Hi All,
As you know, AVCHD video is highly compressed, so it takes a lot more horsepower to edit with it smoothly. With the Mercury Playback Engine, the resources in your computer can be harnessed so that you can do just that.

In order to edit with a fully tuned system, you'll need to pay a bit more attention to how your RAM is configured for the applications you use in CS5. You may need to access and adjust your memory preferences to get the best performance and stability. I've found pages from Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 Help that will help you to understand how to set this preference optimally. Read through them and I think you'll have a better handle on how to adjust those settings according to what your system requires.

Adobe After Effects CS5 * Memory (RAM) usage in 64-bit After Effects (and Premiere Pro)
Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 * Preferences
Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 * About Dynamic Link (Production Premium or Master Collection only)

[Aaron Holmes]

Thanks, Kevin. However, the intent of the thread was to address the AVCHD format; performance was never a concern. CS4 is so crashy, the question for me is never, "How long will it take me to get there?" but rather "Will I *ever* get there?"

The fact that CS5 supports smart-rendering every long-GOP format *except* AVCHD is bizarre, IMO. Smells of strange political/marketing games. I have, at least for now, decided to ignore CS5. We'll see what the updates bring. Whenever possible, I fall back on Corel VideoStudio for my AVCHD endeavors, as its performance for basic cutting and splicing is unrivaled. When I need to do more, I'll limp through with CS4.

Best,
Aaron

EDIT: By the way, this thread was happily dead until today and I'm really not trying to resurrect it. Just replying to Kevin to clarify my concern, which is that Premiere needlessly damages the quality of my AVCHD clips in situations where preserving the original encoding, byte-for-byte, ought to be possible (and has been achieved in other, arguably lesser NLEs). That CS5 can damage them even faster with the help of my GPU is completely orthogonal.

[Kevin Monahan]

Hi Aaron,
Thanks for helping me understand your problem a bit better. Let me see if I can address some of your concerns here.

The fact that CS5 supports smart-rendering every long-GOP format *except* AVCHD is bizarre, IMO. Smells of strange political/marketing games.

Since I am new to Adobe, I wasn't aware of this issue. Let me find out more about this from the Premiere Pro team and I'll address it here, if I can.

I have, at least for now, decided to ignore CS5. We'll see what the updates bring.

Let me know how I can help you get to the promised land. CS5 is a serious upgrade with lots of power, flexibility and, of course, fixes. There are tons of things that were fixed from previous versions (CS3, CS4)

Whenever possible, I fall back on Corel VideoStudio for my AVCHD endeavors, as its performance for basic cutting and splicing is unrivaled.

I'd love to hear more about why you use this system over Premiere Pro CS5. However, you'll have to upgrade to Premiere Pro CS5 to find out, right?

Premiere needlessly damages the quality of my AVCHD clips in situations where preserving the original encoding, byte-for-byte, ought to be possible (and has been achieved in other, arguably lesser NLEs). That CS5 can damage them even faster with the help of my GPU is completely orthogonal.

I'd like to investigate what you mean by "damaging" AVCHD clips. Let me talk to the team and I'll get back to you on this thread.

[Aaron Holmes]

Hi, Kevin. I truly appreciate your willingness to follow up on this. Truly. And I appreciate it even more now that I've been terse and frustrated-sounding. Certainly none of my gripes are aimed at you personally. Let me expand on a few of the items in that case:

With regards to "damaging": I'm simply referring to recompression of already-compressed video where the destination format is the same as the source. The MainConcept MPEG Pro HD plug-in and now Premiere CS5 support "smart-rendering" (I don't know if there's a more appropriate term for this in Adobe vernacular), meaning that unmodified video frames or groups of frames are simply transported directly from source to target byte-for-byte, ensuring that the end result looks exactly as it did, e.g., coming off the camera. Or, rather, they support it for MPEG-2, AVC Intra, XDCAM, and a few others. Not AVCHD. When working with a format like AVCHD, which is Blu-ray compatible, this is such a tantalizing thing, since, at least technically, there is no reason why Premiere/Encore couldn't just copy my Blu-ray-compatible video directly onto a Blu-ray disc (plus menu, perhaps) if that's all I wanted them to do.

And in fact, that is all I am interested in most of the time. I try to get the color and other things looking the way I want them to via controls on the camera, and as I mostly shoot home video, I rarely have time (and don't get paid) to do much else. One might then wonder why I'm using Premiere Pro instead of a more consumery, less capable product. The answer is that I bought Premiere 6.5 back in my standard-def days because I simply couldn't stand any of the other NLEs out there, and I've stuck with it. I'm a creature of habit. :)

As for VideoStudio: Premiere certainly mops the floor with it in almost every way a professional would care about. It has one killer feature though, which is its ability to smart-render AVCHD. If I just need to trim and join some video clips, I can do it at light speed without any degredation in video quality. The downside is that VideoStudio, being geared toward home users who mostly shoot in interlaced modes, doesn't work well some progressive formats that I now have access to thanks to the NX5. Most notably, 720p60 doesn't work. This leads me back to Premiere and causes me to start complaining again about the fact that Premiere has let first-class AVCHD support fall by the wayside in yet another release. If Premiere would bring AVCHD support--particularly smart-rendering--up to the level of MPEG-2, XDCAM, etc., I would be a very happy camper. That would be awesome.

Best,
Aaron

[Kevin Monahan]

Hi Aaron,
I just talked to engineering. It turns out that Adobe Premiere Pro does not support Smart Rendering for any format. If you would like this feature, please file a feature request. You can file a feature request here: http://www.adobe.com/go/wish . More on how to give feedback: feature requests, bug reports, crash reports, and sending feedback After Effects region of interest

Hope this answers your question.