I have searched the forums, and it appears that many people have no trouble using Nero Vision 5 (part of the Nero 8 suite) to smart render HF100 AVCHD. I am having trouble, so I'd appreciate it if anyone could tell me what I'm doing wrong.

I understand that Nero cannot smart render these files if any transitions/titles etc. are introduced. However, I am merely doing trims and rearranges and splits on my source clips, yet I still get less than 100% in the smart rendering report that is generated before the actual render. When I do render, the result is obviously lower quality than the source or than a similar file that I generate with Pixela (the bundled HF100 software).

My workflow is:
1) Create AVCHD Disk
2) Add files from HF100 flash card
3) Edit each individual file with simple trims, splits, rearranging, merging. No transitions or audio changes or titles, or anything else that I know would affect smart rendering.
4) Use default Nero settings to burn.
5) Get to "pre-burn" report which shows that none of my clips will be 100% smart rendered. They usually claim 70-90% smart rendering. This makes me think I am doing something wrong.
6) Burn AVCHD disk to my desktop (as opposed to a DVD-R disk).
7) Play the resulting MTS file (from the AVCHD folder on the desktop), and I notice pixelation and degradation. This degradation does not occur when I play the source file nor when I create a similarly trimmed/split/rearranged file using Pixela.

Does anyone see any error I may be making? Thanks for your time.