I don't consider my use of Vegas with AVCHD to be so very unusual. I want to take camera clips, trim and cut them, and take the edited (trimmed and cut) clips and make AVCHD disks.

Since the camcorder capture format and the AVCHD playback format are absolutely identical, and thus original camcorder clips can be played directly on most BluRay players in the original form with no loss whatsoever in resolution or detail, I find it not only superior from an image quality point of view, but also much prefer to have my disks created in minutes rather than hours.

Given all of the above, it makes no sense whatsoever to re-render. There is no technical reason to re-compress the content if I merely want to trim off the beginnings and ends, and make cuts-only edits.

If you call this an amateur requirement and thus beneath the requirements for an NLE, I would reply that I strongly disagree.

And how entirely ridiculous is it that Vegas smart renders 52% and then decides to start re-rendering?????

Why not call a bug a bug, and stop blaming users for having unreasonable expectations??

Larry

As already stated the smartrender works for me. The only problem I have is that it won't kick back in again for a good 150 to 200 frames afterward.

Try the method I Iisted above and see if it works for you.... it certainly does for me anyway.

As for your other software you list.... I should hope they got the smart render right. There aren't too many things they need to concentrate on since these programs are quite simplistic in nature. Try 3 layer composting with this other software... or a rolling title with custom fonts....or how about a 3d flip?

Rob,

Your advice was OUTSTANDING! It forced me to look at the Audio settings where I discovered that the default setting for Vegas in the Sony AVC Template using .mts was the correct Dolby 2.0, 256 kbit/sec, 48K sampling BUT...........

Sony keeps the box checked to apply AGC to the audio.

Once this box is UNCHECKED, my clips now render 100% as smart-render.

I would have never thought to look at the details of the Audio setting.

Thanks so very much for the excellent guidance.

Larry

Glad to hear you have it worked out!

Agreed... it is a bit finicky and you need to play a little to find the right settings.... but it does work.

More experimentation, and a little less dramatics and just plain flying off the handle.... always works better..... right Sebaz! :)

More experimentation, and a little less dramatics and just plain flying off the handle.... always works better..... right Sebaz! :)

Oh, sure. More experimentation. So I took your advice, I downloaded the trial for 9.0c 64 bit and I threw a bunch of AVCHD clips on the timeline. I made sure to uncheck AGC like Larry did. Well, at times the screen goes black and shows 'No recompression required', but for the most part it's re-rendering most of the timeline. So no, AVCHD does not work in Vegas 9.0c. I'll give you that playback seems to have improved, as I haven't encountered the stutter bug after starting playback from many places in the timeline and letting it play through cuts. But no, smart render doesn't work, period.

I wonder how my settings differ from yours, Sebaz, or if there are other issues such as 32bit versus 64bit?Are you using HF100 Canon AVCHD or some other profile? I have read that Canon uses a different profile than Sony, for another possible explanation.

I would be glad to try one of your clips on my machine if that might help isolate the cause.

Larry

I have both Sony and Canon... both work.... 64 bit as well as 32 bit.... both work

If it's anything here it's a bit of inexperience mixed with a significant lot of irrational anger. Heck of a mix!

Larry:
Since the camcorder capture format and the AVCHD playback format are absolutely identical, and thus original camcorder clips can be played directly on most BluRay players in the original form with no loss whatsoever in resolution or detail, I find it not only superior from an image quality point of view, but also much prefer to have my disks created in minutes rather than hours.

Thanks! I was not aware of this at all. I do have a blueray player, and yes - I will test it.

Ingvar

Rather than start a new topic, I found that this is exactly the issue I'm trying to tackle. I have a Canon Vixia HF10 (not the HF100 that this thread was initially about), but I simply cannot get Vegas to render its footage without recompressing.

Very simply, if I put a clip from this camera on my Vegas 9.0c timeline, then render out to the Sony AVC template (with the proper dimensions and such - the "=" sign is there on the selector, and I choose the .m2ts system since that's what these clips are), at first the render hums along with "no decompression required" in the preview window, but invariably, the picture will always come back to the preview window and the "approximate time left" readout starts jumping way up. This is without doing anything to the clip other than dropping it on the timeline.

I tried deselecting the Automatic Gain Control setting which seemed to work for Larry, and I've also tried variations on just about all the other settings, but can't get anything to work. I just thought I'd post here to see if anyone had any other thoughts.

System: Vista 64bit with 4GB RAM running Vegas 9.0c 64 bit.

For what it's worth, I also cannot use the Pixel ImageMixer 3 program that came with the camera. Any file I save out of there crashes Vegas straight to the desktop as soon as I try to put it on the timeline, or even sometimes just upon import (both 8.0c 32 bit and 9.0c 64-bit). But ImageMixer is a weird program, so maybe I'm doing something wrong.

Basically I just have long files from the camera that I really only need to archive small portions of. I just want to trim off all the stuff I don't need but not have to recompress the portion I do want.

I have the HF100 and this was "the" feature I was looking for to work for me in VP9. I checked it out in the trial and couldn't get it to work. I'm hoping it will work in the next version.

I also have a lot of video that needs Smartrender trimming.

- Mark

Matt, that's pretty much what happens in Vegas 9 at this point, it's not something you're doing wrong, it's simply that the smart-render feature is not well implemented.

What I don't understand is why you put a file exported from Pixela into Vegas. Pixela sucks when it comes to the interface, but it's excellent at doing smart-render, producing a one hour video in about 7 minutes. it's obviously far from being professional, but If you have footage from a trip that you were careful to set everything right in the camera and you don't need to do any color correction, Pixela is the best choice. You just have to put up with the annoying interface and workflow, but at least your video will look great.

>What I don't understand is why you put a
>file exported from Pixela into Vegas.

Well, the main reason I wanted to do it this time was just to confirm that Pixela really had "smart rendered" the clip. When I first got the camera a couple of years ago, that was one of the first tests I did with the software that came with the camera - put the trimmed clip out of Pixela above the untrimmed clip in Vegas, then switched back-and-forth between them. Back then, I could see a difference, so whatever I was doing, Pixela WAS NOT smart rendering; it was recompressing.

But I'd need to do it regularly anyway. Basically, the project in question requires me to start the camera several minutes before the firing of a rocket engine for tests. So I often end up with something like a six minute clip where I only need to keep one minute of it. So before I even bring it into Vegas for editing, I want to trim the portion of the clip I don't need. I don't want that much footage that I simply don't need eating up hard drive space.

So being able to truncate AVCHD clips without recompress would be valuable to me; being able to do it in the same program that I'm going to be editing together the final video would be a huge plus.

I think smartrendering for Canon HF100 footage works - BUT only when you do not trimm the even in the beginning. Unfortunately that is not worth a lot, I think - but smartrendering of AVCHD has never been an official feature of Vegas, I think.

As stated above, the smart render does work but it's quite picky and a bit flawed. I have found that most of the time it's the audio that somehow gets in the way of the smart render system.

Try using the standard M2TS template and uncheck "audio"... see where that gets you. That usually does it for me. I will then render out a separate audio track and mux it in either DVDa or TSmuxeR (depending on where my final output is going).

>Try using the standard M2TS template
>and uncheck "audio"

I always use the M2TS template since that's what these files are, M2TS. Unchecking "audio" made no difference.

But with a little more experimentation, here's what I did find: the clip I was testing with today was three minutes long, and with this one, if I did nothing to it, just dropped it on the timeline and rendered, then it would smart recomress no problem.

Going off of what Wolfgang suggested, I then trimmed only the outpoint and re-rendered, and again no problem - smart rendered the whole way through.

But then, as soon as I trimmed the in point, it would briefly say "no recompression required," and then the picture would reappear and the approximate time left estimate started climbing. This makes me wonder if the issue is that I'm not cutting the inpoint on an i-frame. Anyone know how I can tell which frame is an i-frame, or how I can find out how many pictures are in the GOP in the video from a Canon HF10 so I can test that?

Exactly. That's not what I would call "it works". etc... etc...

Do we know what we are talking about?

Just checked 2 of my cameras: with the same settings one of them delivers AVCHD at an average Mbps PER CLIP from 5.137 and up to 14.868 (results over some 100 clips from yesterday).

I would certainly not expect that such a spread in the input always smartrenders in Vegas? - actually what I see is that some of them do smartrender and some do not and some do it halfway through.

This is just data from one camera - with the multitude of cameras around some will smartrender and some not.

"But then, as soon as I trimmed the in point, it would briefly say "no recompression required," and then the picture would reappear and the approximate time left estimate started climbing. This makes me wonder if the issue is that I'm not cutting the inpoint on an i-frame."

Well I can get the smart render to kick out/in again as it hits a transition installed on the time line, but what I have noticed is that it will take up to 200 frames AFTER the transition to kick back into smart render mode again.