AVCHD problem solution

MikeyH wrote on 8/17/2010, 8:47 AM
I have a Sony HDR-XR500 hard drive camcorder.
I have had a very long struggle finding an editor which can manage these files. MS10 is as good as I have found, but even it has a problem at times with large projects. I finally bought TMPGEnc 4.0 express, which I use to batch convert the files from the camcorder (.mts) to HDVformat MPEG (HDV-HD2) files (.m2t). The converted files are larger and there is no noticable loss in quality in conversion. I have had no difficulty in editing and rendering the converted files. My computer is Windows 7 64bit with an i7 950 processor and 12 megs memory.

Comments

Eugenia wrote on 8/17/2010, 10:51 AM
No, there is a massive loss of quality, even if you're eyes are not trained to see it easily, it IS there. Your XR500 doesn't even have fully AVCHD bitrate to start with, but M2T is always 25mbps. Which is pretty low, especially when going from h.264 to mpeg2 (instead of the most encoding-compatible mpeg2-to-mpeg2 or h.264-to-h.264). When applying plugins on top of such beaten-down quality, your footage won't be able to support the harsh treatment of plugins, and it will break down visually.

If your PC is not fast enough for AVCHD, either upgrade it, or go Cineform. Or install the free Matrox mpeg2 AVI codec (tmpgenc should be able to "see it" in its list of codecs). Matrox's mpeg2 special intermediate codec goes up to 250 mbps. Certainly not 25 mbps.
Byron K wrote on 8/17/2010, 11:07 AM
I generally convert highly compressed media to a format like .m2t, .avi or .mts. Highly compressed media takes a lot of CPU and this can take some of the horsepower away from Vegas' processes which may be what you're experiencing.

Less compressed media like uncompressed .avi plays well w/ Vegas because there's less processing to play back the video though the file is much larger.

Just a layman's understanding of how this works, others here w/ more expertise than me can explain this better than I can.

BTW, if you have only 12 "megs" of RAM that may be the issue. ((: