I should have made myself more clear on the problem:

AVCHD in and AVCHD out. Beyond about 1 min and 45 seconds the audio and video will go out of sync and frame rate drops dramatically going to jerky video in the rendered output.

During render I can see memory usage slowly goes up - thus why I say there is a memory leak.

I have tried other software - none of them use near the memory that VMS does handling AVCHD...and they can playback full screen 1920x1080 preview without studdering...something VMS can't do either.

I have never had a crashing problem with VMS....

Rob

I have a question: why do you want AVCHD output specifically? There are other options, depending on how you want to present your output. There's no inherent need to output in the same format as the input.

Incidentally, a memory leak isn't necessarily indicated by slowly growing memory usage during rendering. There's no way for us to know whether or what Vegas is using that memory for. However, if after the completion of rendering the amount of memory still allocated is greater than it was immediately before rendering began, then that might indicate a memory leak.

I want to use AVCHD to make AVCHD disk that my Panasonic blu ray supports - that means 17 MBit video (18 max) at full resolution.

I am struggling with 3 different software packages - with VMS being one choice. The other 2 have video quality issues right now but render faster with much less memory usage and no AV sync issues.

All 3 of these need a patch in my opinion.

Rob

I thought that might be the case. Then you don't want to render to AVCHD output because your Panasonic Blu-ray disc player won't support it*. The AVCHD disc format is not the same as the AVCHD file format. Your Panasonic Blu-ray disc player requires AVCHD conform to the AVCHD disc format. Vegas Movie Studio Platinum 9 does not provide any AVCHD disc format option, nor does DVD Architect Studio 4.5 . Hope is not lost, though. VMSP9 does provide a Blu-ray disc output option, and that can be converted to AVCHD disc format with the freeware program multiAVCHD.

Here are more detailed steps of doing that that work for me:
1) Create and edit your high-definition video in Vegas Platinum 9, and render it out to your computer hard disk in Blu-ray iso image format (Make Movie/Burn it to a DVD, Blu-ray Disc, or CD/Blu-ray Disc/Render image only + Sony AVC (*.mp4;*.m2ts;*.avc) + Blu-ray 1920x1080-60i, 16 Mbps video stream). (Note: 16Mbps is near the highest bit rate that DVDs support; in particular, they do not support a 24Mbps video stream. If you require a 24Mbps video stream then you must use a Blu-ray writer and Blu-ray media as well as a Blu-ray player. There is nothing wrong or unreasonable with recording your video at 24Mbps for the highest possible quality and then rendering it for 16Mbps output. The results are excellent.)

2) Mount the Blu-ray disk iso image file created in step 1 to a virtual drive on your file system. (You can use the free DAEMON Tools Lite program to mount it. If you use Windows XP you need to install UDF 2.50 file system drivers first, which can be obtained for free. Vista and Windows 7 supposedly support UDF 2.50 natively, but I don't have either and haven't tested them to confirm that.)

3) Use the multiAVCHD program to convert the Blu-ray m2ts video file on the virtual drive that the Blu-ray iso file image was mounted on in step 2. multiAVCHD converts the m2ts file to AVCHD format and writes it and all supporting files in AVCHD DVD structure to your computer hard disk. (multiAVCHD is freeware. If you like it, you can donate whatever you choose to the author.)

4) Burn the AVCHD DVD structure and files created in step 3 onto a DVD. You can use the free ImgBurn program to do so. You must burn the DVD using the UDF 2.50 file system, which is selectable in ImgBurn.

5) Play your AVCHD DVD on any AVCHD compatible Blu-ray disk player. You get Blu-ray disk quality on DVD media. It's great, but you're limited to about 40 minutes of AVCHD video per single layer DVD.

- - - - - - - - - - - - -

There may be a somewhat simpler approach, which I haven't tried:

1b) Render your output to 16Mbps AVCHD file format in VMSP9.

2b) Same as step 3, above, except convert the AVCHD file created in step 1b. (I believe multiAVCHD incorporates tsMUXer internally, which corrects the A/V sync issue you have.)

3b) Same as step 4, above.

4b) Same as step 5, above.

- - - - - - - - - - - - -

* If you want to prove that to yourself, shoot a little 17Mbps (FXP mode) AVCHD video with your camcorder. Copy one AVCHD file from the camcorder's flash memory to a DVD disc. Insert that disc in your Panasonic Blu-ray disc player, and try to play it. It won't work.