AVCHD experience...my poor cpu

Mel Enriquez · May 1st, 2009, 02:33 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bruce Foreman

You may not gain much by taking your overclocking further. Comments in various forums by folks with quad core running at about 3Ghz are having good luck with AVCHD and it sounds like you are already in that "sweet spot". And see Larry Horwitz' comment on the higher (24Mbps) bitrate on the new Canon's.

I'm afraid, you are right, Bruce. Fortunately, or unfortunately, I've already paid for my 1066 Kingston HyperX memory and just waiting for it. If I can get even 3.1ghz, I'll be happy :). But I really want to push it to 3.2ghz. I've read some have managed to go as high as 3.5ghz. But I think that is a bit of stretch for me.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bruce Foreman

I have been following the HF S100 videos posted around with great interest. I think the feature of greatest interest to me at the present time is the larger "roller" for manual focus control. I missed the smaller "roller" that was on the HV20 and the joystick control of manual focus on the HF100 is something I tolerate at best.

Just the same it looks like I will stay with the HF100's for awhile, at least until the HF S100 comes down a lot. But again looking at Larry's comments (and I place a lot of stock in what he says) if I had one now, I would have to set it for the same res/bitrate as the highest setting on the HF100 (FXP I believe).

Welcome. I get a lot of good info out of these discussions.

Bruce

I would love to have that too. Focusing is one of the things, that's hard to with buttons being pushed. It's easier instead if there is a ring, a dial, or a "roller" is involved.

I passed on the s100 for the hf-100 as I know I will just kick myself when the next big thing comes around. :( It's still a good camera. I love it. I'll wait for the next round after the hf-s100 where hopefully they'll have a 720-60p or something like it. And maybe use a larger sensor to get more light in. I just hope they stop at 8mp on the stills resolution as it won't help much if they make the sensor large but cram more pixel in there.

Thanks for your thoughts.

Jim Bigg · May 1st, 2009, 02:30 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Larry Horwitz

Yes, if a drive is reading it cannot be writing, and vice versa. Two drives thus improve performance over one, and it is common for work files to be placed on one drive and rendering done to another for this very reason.

Thanks, Larry. I just copied the mts files from my SR8's drive to a folder on my editing computer. I'm going to try a small project with VS. I'll let you know what happens. By the way Larry, can you define more clearly what "work files" and "rendering" are from your last post? Right now without using my esata external connections, I have a 300Gb 10,000 rpm system drive where VS resides. I also have a 1 Tb 7,200 rpm drive. Both built in satas. How should I set my VS preferences, etc. so I am using these resources most effectively:e.g., original vid files on Tb, VS program on system drive, etc.?

Thanks and sorry to keep pursuing this. I'm sure my not being clear on this as yet is simply some genetic defect caused by having to go to work all those years! It's certainly not my fault! :-)

Jim

Larry Horwitz · May 2nd, 2009, 06:57 AM

Jim,

Glad to help you Jim and no apologies needed. I am a silver haired retired guy myself and went to work "all those years" myself starting in the 1960's......

All of the video editing programs create temporary files during their normal processing, so as to allow for seeing previews, create on-screen simulations of the video effects, segregating audio and video, and a myriad of other things. I have refered to these temporary files as "work files" but different programs call them by different names. Video Studio calls them "working files", whereas other programs call them scratch files, user files, caches, etc. The important concept is to make use of your second hard disk to share the workload.

Since the eventual output of your editing and disk authoring is to make ("render") a final version, this rendering step normally is quite time consuming and can benefit from having its content written on a different disk than the one used for work files. In theory, the work files are being read and the rendered output file is being written concurrently, and in fact, the very process of making the rendered output file is essentially processing the work files. So in Video Studio I would chose to set the Preferences to put the work files on one drive and the final rendered file(s) on the other drive.

This arrangement also relies on the fact that the Video Studio pprogram itself is essentially all resident in RAM and need not be swapped in from the hard disk. This is a valid assumption for modern machines of the type we are are using.

You will find that there are places to set the working file directories in VS12 Preferences, as well as designate the output location for rendering when you get to the final output stage. In these two dialogs, I would set the folder locations to your two different drives.

As I stated earlier, disk drive performance is NOT the bottleneck in most of this work, since the AVCHD files in particular are highly compressed, thus requiring far fewer bytes to transfer, and the files themselves are complex, requiring gobs of CPU capacity to unpack and re-pack. I thus would caution you that the concern regarding which disks should hold which files is really getting disproportionate attention here, since in pratcial terms the drives are far faster than they need to be for this type of work whereas the processor / CPU is struggling to do the job even when a quadcore Intel Extreme QX9650 3.0GHz such as mine is being employed.

Hope this helps a bit.

Larry

Bryan Sellars · May 2nd, 2009, 05:51 PM

Hi Jim, I have the HF10 and edit on Corel Video Studio Pro X2, the computer is a Intel Core 2 Duo 3HZ with 2GB ram and a single 500GB HD partitioned into separated drives so C drive only has programs on it and nothing else, I keep backups on an external 500Gb HD drive and also use a WD TV media player with separate 500GB HD and do all my videos at 1920x1080i which take 8 times real time to render, the ones I put on Vimeo I do at 1280x720p and use Super "C" to convert to .mov, now the main problem I find with ProX2 is that if you use the smart render option it will misplace parts of clips when doing cross fades ext. at the edit point, the only way to overcome this is to make sure you unselect the smart render when you go to "Share" to make the video AVCHD 1920, you will find it in the "options" tab, this says it will make the video at 18000kbps max bit rate, which is a bit of a let down as the average bit rate is only around 11200kbps, when I checked it out, I have written to them to ask them if they are likely to be putting out a patch to allow a higher out put. I see with some programs like Premiere Elements 7 you can specify which type of AVCHD you want to make whether it is Main Profile 4.0 or High Profile 4.1 this gives you the option to go as high as 35000kbps, with any permeation you want to select in between.
All the programs I've tried over the last few months seem to have issues handling AVCHD at the edit points and when doing cross fades and in my last edit making a 7 min video I had to go back and trim clips to get clean cross fades in a couple of places, it seems most programs are still in the development stage when it comes to AVCHD.
My very first post to this website so hope I haven't gone over other peoples ground to much
Cheers Bryan

Jim Bigg · May 3rd, 2009, 08:55 AM

Larry,

Thanks for the response. I'll have at it with some editing and post some commentary about my results. I am disabling "smart render" so that I can work natively. This may help me avoid the glitches Bryan mentioned. By the way, if I make an AVCHD disk, can it be plaed by an SD dvd player - either stand alone or in anyone's computer? If not, can I also burn my edited and menued AVCHD movie so it can be played on an SD machine? And, finally, when editing and menuing an SD movie, I could make an .ISO file to save for future copies. Will VS give me this option with AVCHD?

Bryan,

Thanks for the comments. I want to eventually make smaller vids that can be placed on thumb drives and be played by plugging into something like a WD player or computer or plasma display.

Jim

Larry Horwitz · May 3rd, 2009, 12:10 PM

Jim,
AVCHD disks can be played on many but not all BluRay set-top players, Sony Playstation 3 consoles, and computers which have appropriate AVCHD playback software from such companies as Nero, Arcsoft, Cyberlink, or Corel. They will NOT play on standard defintion players. You can author standard definition DVDs from high def content such as footage from your AVCHD camcorder, and these will play in standard players, but they will obviously lack the detail and beauty of the high def original content.

Corel does not appear to provide a method to create .iso files for retention and re-use when bnurning AVCHD disks. The folder which is used by Corel's burning engine is, however, saved on the hard disk, and other burning programs such as Nero Burning ROM can create an .iso file, burn additional copies of the AVCHD, or both.

Hope this helps Jim,

Larry

Bruce Foreman · May 3rd, 2009, 03:55 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jim Bigg

Larry,

By the way, if I make an AVCHD disk, can it be plaed by an SD dvd player - either stand alone or in anyone's computer?

NO! It not only will not play but in most cases will refuse to eject and the DVD player will have to be serviced to get the disk out. There used to be a lot of warnings about this.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jim Bigg

If not, can I also burn my edited and menued AVCHD movie so it can be played on an SD machine? And, finally, when editing and menuing an SD movie, I could make an .ISO file to save for future copies. Will VS give me this option with AVCHD?

Your software should give you some regular DVD options. Everything I use allows this from the same HD timeline I edit from.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jim Bigg

I want to eventually make smaller vids that can be placed on thumb drives and be played by plugging into something like a WD player or computer or plasma display.

You don't have to make them smaller. I just render to HD WMV (other file formats are supposed to work too but that's all I've used so far) and copy it over to a thumb drive. Longest vid I've done this with is 26 minutes and it didn't go over 2GB. Plays great from a thumb drive.

Bryan Sellars · May 3rd, 2009, 04:07 PM

Hi Jim, I did some experiments a few months ago with a Sony Play Station 3 and found I could author a AVCHD m2ts or MTS file to a standard DVD using Video Studio ProX2 and it played fine but unfortunately PS3 does not playback good PAL AVCHD from it's hard drive, probably OK with NTSC. so that's why I finished up buying the WD TV Media Player and it was cheaper. but it's like Larry say's AVCHD authored to a DVD won't work on all Blue-ray players or any standard DVD players. The WD TV Media Player has 2 USB2 inputs so you can leave a HDD attached and use a USB2 flash drive for short videos and testing.
One other thing I should mention if you make standard DVD's from AVCHD which is upper field first you will have to change the field order of the DVD to upper field first, or you will finish up with interlace jitter in your video.

Bryan

May 2nd, 2009, 05:51 PM	#34
Bryan Sellars Regular Crew Join Date: Apr 2009 Location: Nelson, New Zealand Posts: 63	Corel Video Studio Pro X2 Hi Jim, I have the HF10 and edit on Corel Video Studio Pro X2, the computer is a Intel Core 2 Duo 3HZ with 2GB ram and a single 500GB HD partitioned into separated drives so C drive only has programs on it and nothing else, I keep backups on an external 500Gb HD drive and also use a WD TV media player with separate 500GB HD and do all my videos at 1920x1080i which take 8 times real time to render, the ones I put on Vimeo I do at 1280x720p and use Super "C" to convert to .mov, now the main problem I find with ProX2 is that if you use the smart render option it will misplace parts of clips when doing cross fades ext. at the edit point, the only way to overcome this is to make sure you unselect the smart render when you go to "Share" to make the video AVCHD 1920, you will find it in the "options" tab, this says it will make the video at 18000kbps max bit rate, which is a bit of a let down as the average bit rate is only around 11200kbps, when I checked it out, I have written to them to ask them if they are likely to be putting out a patch to allow a higher out put. I see with some programs like Premiere Elements 7 you can specify which type of AVCHD you want to make whether it is Main Profile 4.0 or High Profile 4.1 this gives you the option to go as high as 35000kbps, with any permeation you want to select in between. All the programs I've tried over the last few months seem to have issues handling AVCHD at the edit points and when doing cross fades and in my last edit making a 7 min video I had to go back and trim clips to get clean cross fades in a couple of places, it seems most programs are still in the development stage when it comes to AVCHD. My very first post to this website so hope I haven't gone over other peoples ground to much Cheers Bryan

May 2nd, 2009, 06:57 AM	#33
Larry Horwitz Major Player Join Date: Mar 2007 Location: Eggertsville, NY Posts: 528	Jim, Glad to help you Jim and no apologies needed. I am a silver haired retired guy myself and went to work "all those years" myself starting in the 1960's...... All of the video editing programs create temporary files during their normal processing, so as to allow for seeing previews, create on-screen simulations of the video effects, segregating audio and video, and a myriad of other things. I have refered to these temporary files as "work files" but different programs call them by different names. Video Studio calls them "working files", whereas other programs call them scratch files, user files, caches, etc. The important concept is to make use of your second hard disk to share the workload. Since the eventual output of your editing and disk authoring is to make ("render") a final version, this rendering step normally is quite time consuming and can benefit from having its content written on a different disk than the one used for work files. In theory, the work files are being read and the rendered output file is being written concurrently, and in fact, the very process of making the rendered output file is essentially processing the work files. So in Video Studio I would chose to set the Preferences to put the work files on one drive and the final rendered file(s) on the other drive. This arrangement also relies on the fact that the Video Studio pprogram itself is essentially all resident in RAM and need not be swapped in from the hard disk. This is a valid assumption for modern machines of the type we are are using. You will find that there are places to set the working file directories in VS12 Preferences, as well as designate the output location for rendering when you get to the final output stage. In these two dialogs, I would set the folder locations to your two different drives. As I stated earlier, disk drive performance is NOT the bottleneck in most of this work, since the AVCHD files in particular are highly compressed, thus requiring far fewer bytes to transfer, and the files themselves are complex, requiring gobs of CPU capacity to unpack and re-pack. I thus would caution you that the concern regarding which disks should hold which files is really getting disproportionate attention here, since in pratcial terms the drives are far faster than they need to be for this type of work whereas the processor / CPU is struggling to do the job even when a quadcore Intel Extreme QX9650 3.0GHz such as mine is being employed. Hope this helps a bit. Larry

May 3rd, 2009, 08:55 AM	#35
Jim Bigg New Boot Join Date: Feb 2009 Location: Amelia Island, Florida Posts: 23	Larry, Thanks for the response. I'll have at it with some editing and post some commentary about my results. I am disabling "smart render" so that I can work natively. This may help me avoid the glitches Bryan mentioned. By the way, if I make an AVCHD disk, can it be plaed by an SD dvd player - either stand alone or in anyone's computer? If not, can I also burn my edited and menued AVCHD movie so it can be played on an SD machine? And, finally, when editing and menuing an SD movie, I could make an .ISO file to save for future copies. Will VS give me this option with AVCHD? Bryan, Thanks for the comments. I want to eventually make smaller vids that can be placed on thumb drives and be played by plugging into something like a WD player or computer or plasma display. Jim

May 3rd, 2009, 12:10 PM	#36
Larry Horwitz Major Player Join Date: Mar 2007 Location: Eggertsville, NY Posts: 528	Jim, AVCHD disks can be played on many but not all BluRay set-top players, Sony Playstation 3 consoles, and computers which have appropriate AVCHD playback software from such companies as Nero, Arcsoft, Cyberlink, or Corel. They will NOT play on standard defintion players. You can author standard definition DVDs from high def content such as footage from your AVCHD camcorder, and these will play in standard players, but they will obviously lack the detail and beauty of the high def original content. Corel does not appear to provide a method to create .iso files for retention and re-use when bnurning AVCHD disks. The folder which is used by Corel's burning engine is, however, saved on the hard disk, and other burning programs such as Nero Burning ROM can create an .iso file, burn additional copies of the AVCHD, or both. Hope this helps Jim, Larry

May 3rd, 2009, 04:07 PM	#38
Bryan Sellars Regular Crew Join Date: Apr 2009 Location: Nelson, New Zealand Posts: 63	Hi Jim, I did some experiments a few months ago with a Sony Play Station 3 and found I could author a AVCHD m2ts or MTS file to a standard DVD using Video Studio ProX2 and it played fine but unfortunately PS3 does not playback good PAL AVCHD from it's hard drive, probably OK with NTSC. so that's why I finished up buying the WD TV Media Player and it was cheaper. but it's like Larry say's AVCHD authored to a DVD won't work on all Blue-ray players or any standard DVD players. The WD TV Media Player has 2 USB2 inputs so you can leave a HDD attached and use a USB2 flash drive for short videos and testing. One other thing I should mention if you make standard DVD's from AVCHD which is upper field first you will have to change the field order of the DVD to upper field first, or you will finish up with interlace jitter in your video. Bryan