HD Platinum 10 and "smart rendering"

Folk wrote on 6/21/2010, 6:32 PM

I've just upgraded from Platinum 9 to 10. A new behavior I noticed when rendering a project (which was created in 9) is something called "smart rendering" or rendering without recompression. It supposedly only kicks in when everything matches (width, height, framerate, etc.) between the source and output formats. This would be a great feature if it worked, but in my tests the output file has weird blocky artifacts.

I searched in the help file and found that a new option in the general preferences tab (Enable no-recompress long-GOP rendering) is supposed to turn this "smart rendering" on/off, but unchecking it doesn't work... it still is trying to render the file without recompressing. You can tell this is happening because the preview window shows "No recompression required" on a black background.

So is this a bug? Is there no way to turn off this "smart rendering"?

BTW, this doesn't happen during the entire rendering of the movie. The movie made up of a bunch of clips and only the early clips passed through without recompression and those are the ones that have the blocky artifacts. The clips that are rendered are fine.

Comments

Folk wrote on 6/28/2010, 2:30 PM

OK, I sent this problem to support and have received an answer.

I was using Xvid compression to render these clips (which are webcam clips that were compressed at capture time with Xvid as well) and according to Sony, Xvid is not supported!

Well, that sucks. Xvid worked just fine in Movie Studio 9. If they don't support something, then they shouldn't make it available as a rendering option! I guess it's back to version 9 for me.

It's disheartening to see a product lose capability with a newer release.

BTW, it isn't that Xvid compression doesn't work... it works just fine. It's Sony's "smart rendering" that's broken. If I apply a global change to the entire project (bumping the brightness up 1 notch, for example) then that forces MS 10 to render the entire project instead of "smart rendering" some of the clips, and that renders just fine.

Eugenia wrote on 6/28/2010, 3:04 PM

You can disable smart rendering in the Vegas preferences. So if that's what's broken with XViD, then don't use that particular feature. No need to go back to 9 otherwise.

Folk wrote on 6/28/2010, 7:19 PM

What option in preferences are you talking about? The only one I could find was the "Enable no-recompress long-GOP rendering", but according to Sony that only affects HD rendering and has no impact on SD rendering. Regardless, it doesn't turn off smart rendering.

Eugenia wrote on 6/28/2010, 9:49 PM

Then trick the software to think that it has to render. E.g. apply a plugin that does virtually nothing.

Folk wrote on 6/29/2010, 9:40 AM

I tried that already (applying an overall brightness bump of 1) and that works, but in the end I ended up uninstalling 10 and going back to 9. There simply isn't anything in 10 that compels me to stick with it. All I'm doing is jumping through extra hoops to get the same results I was getting with 9.

Luckily, I got a free upgrade to 10 (I purchased 9 just before 10 came out) so I'm not out any cash. I may try 10 later on when they've cleaned it up a bit.