Vegas 12 does not support smart render on anything using the AVC codec.

Steve,

I didn't know that it was impossible to Smartrender AVCHD video. Why is that?

I know it is possible to Smartrender MPEG-2, it worked beautifully in Ulead's Mediastudio Pro 8 years ago.. What is it about AVCHD that makes it impossible to Smartrender as compared to MPEG-2? The longer GOP sequence? Other more advanced encoding techniques in AVCHD?

Or did you mean to say that that incorporating AVCHD Smartrender is significantly more difficult than with MPEG-2?

AVCHD has a complex GOP dynamic structure that can be hundreds of frames long.
MPEG-2 has a simple static GOP, usually 15 frames.
The implications of reindexing alone for AVC smart render in an NLE are significant. Vegas "used" to have a feature that would smart render AVC, right up until the first non-Iframe cut.

If you want to join AVCHD files without re-encoding, VideoRedo TV Suite or TSDoctor are your friends.

Someone is bound to read this and bring up DOS concatenation, but that does not reindex TS streams, meaning the player has to fill in the holes in broken GOPs, and the concatenated TS files probably would not open correctly in an NLE.

Apologies, I've given you all a bad description.

My source is 1920 x 1080 AVCHD. I know that Vegas doesn't smart render AVCHD.

I've tried rendering to 1920 x 1080 MPEG-2 because my normal workflow is to work in small segments, then combine them all on a TL, and smart render. The only thing I've changed in my usual HDV template that does smart render is the 1920 size, so can't understand why it doesn't smart render.
Hope that's a bit clearer!

AVCHD is MPEG4 AVC.

HDV is MPEG2.

You can smart render MPEG2 in Vegas under certain circumstances.

You cannot smart render AVCHD in Vegas since Version 9d and later.

Vegas 9c will smart render 1440x1080 AVCHD or 1920x1080 AVCHD but not between frame sizes.

You cannot smart render to a different codec with any software. It would be a contradiction.

You cannot smart render to a different frame size with any software. It would be a contrdiction.

You cannot smart render to a different bit rate with any software. It would be a contradiction.

Great post, Peter. +1 to everything you said.

In Mediastudio Pro all you had to so was make sure every setting except the bitrate was spot on the video you wanted to Smartrender. The bit rate only had to be equal to or greater than source as the application was "Smart" enough to know not to re-render it to a higher bit rate. Unless of course you had Smartrender turned off.

Having to re-render video that may already be highly compressed, as with many consumer AVCHD formats, is a rather inelegant method of video creation in my opinion.

I know I'm one of the rare people would would rather have AVCHD Smartrender instead of 3D video and 7.1 sound.

+1 to Hulk

"all you had to so was make sure every setting except the bitrate was spot on the video you wanted to Smartrender. The bit rate only had to be equal to or greater than source"

I've never understood that mindset on the part of the programmers. Seems to me it would be a whole lot better to have a 'smartrender' option in the rendering parameters, and if you selected this everything else would 'grey out' and the software would match everything for you.

"the application was "Smart" enough to know not to re-render it to a higher bit rate"

Well, it's impossible to "Smart" render to a higher bitrate, or a lower bitrate, or to any bitrate other than the source. Smart render operates by copying the source directly into the output, so there can't be anything different at all. So, why even allow the user to pick any settings when attempting to smart render and risk them changing anything that would then prevent smart rendering from happening? Again, much better to just have a button to click saying "smart render this", and let the software take care of it all by using the settings from the source.

The five things you must match for Vegas smart render to work are resolution, pixel aspect, field order, bitrate, and frame rate.

Right. And that being true, why leave it to the user to try to make sure they get it all right? Surely Vegas could do a much better job of assuring it than the user by simply telling it, "please smart render this for me."

To have to match all 5 things yourself and then have Vegas say "oh, this might be a smart render situation" just seems backward.

While I agree with the fact that MS Pro smart rendered FAR more efficiently years ago than Vegas does now. (or any other NLE than I know for that matter). Can we get back to my original question folks?

"The five things you must match for Vegas smart render to work are resolution, pixel aspect, field order, bitrate, and frame rate."

I am doing exactly that. I'm rendering an AVCHD file to an equivalent sized Main Concept MPEG-2 template, then using the same identical template to re-render the resulting file. It doesn't smart render. I thought all MPEG-2 smart rendered?Can anyone reproduce this?

OK, worked out by trial and error what I was doing wrong. I had changed the HDV template to 1920 width and assumed that it would still smart render. What I've done now is also change 'output type' from HDV to MPEG-2 and 'Level' to High. This smart renders in either 'i' or 'p' flavours.

Have a good Christmas all! :-)

Chienworks,

Imagine you have two different types of video in the timeline. 90% of it is from your video camera and the rest from your cell phone or some other lower fidelity source. By manually setting the Smartrender parameters you can be sure which format is being Smartrendered and which is being transcoded. You wouldn't want the cell phone video smartrendered and the video camera footage transcoded to the cell phone format!

Now I agree there are better ways than manually setting the parameters of the smartrender video. Perhaps a "Smartrender Eyedropper" where you actually click on the type of video in the timeline that you would like Smartrendered.

Although I am a big proponent of Smartrender I concede that as camera bit rates rise there is less and less need for it. Camera encoding is primarily limited by electrical and thermal design decisions. You can't put a fast, hot, power hungry processor in a camera just so that it can more efficiently compress the video. So less powerful processors are used and instead recording bitrates are increased in order to achieve video quality. This is actually a good tradeoff because memory card are cheap these days and in general less heavily compressed sources will be easier on the NLE when it comes time to edit.

A 24Mpbs stream from the camera can generally be compressed down to 8Mbps using a high quality 2-pass encoder assuming there is a sufficient mix of static and dynamic scenes in the final project. Of course it's a different situation if you are creating a surfing video!

My first AVCHD camera recorded video at 16Mpbs and fell apart quite badly with high motion and especially water scenes, transcoding during Vegas render only made a bad situation worse. My current camera outputs video at 24Mbps and does a much better job with highly dynmaic scenes so Smartrender is not a huge priority.

When it comes to Vegas, if I had to choose between Smartrender and a really good H.264 encoder I'd choose the encoder actually so I didn't have to always frameserve my output to Ripbot for super high quality output.

The five things you must match for Vegas smart render to work are resolution, pixel aspect, field order, bitrate, and frame rate. - AND the source must be a "program" type.