Blink- this may be a little vague here, but is V9 actually handling the AVCHD clips better overall? Fewer frame drops when playing the timeline etc. I'm only running 32bit Vista maxed 3gig of RAM, but if V9 isn't really night and day different in working with the MTS files, then I may not bother for awhile.

It certainly renders a heck of a lot better (and faster) than in 8... and the quality is there better than before as a final result. The time line playback is a LITTLE better but certainly not perfect. I gat full framerate until I hit a transition or effect then it drops off pretty good so I still have to use dynamic ram to properly view a transition. Overall I guess I would have to say that V9 brings avchd editing fairly close to the level of editing that you would expect from HDV in Vegas.

Now is that good? Well... I think so anyway. Given the level of compression that this stuff is at, it's going to be tough to get full frame rate no matter what you do. I certainly think the overall render experience if nothing else is worth the money. In V8 I always rendered my avchd over to mpeg as a final because the avchd rendering just wasn't there. In V9 I will probably start going with avchd all the way.

Does the 64 bit version give 1920x1080 as an option for rendering AVCHD or is that still only in the 32 bit version?

So far I have done nothing but work with the 32 bit version so I'm a blank when it comes to 64. Hopefully I'll get some time to look at the 64 version next week. I'm not taking that version as seriously since we have yet to work out the various plugins and stuff.

64 bit systems (computers and the software) is still new enough so that it hasn't quite settled yet... IMO

No-recompression rendering (eg SmartRender) is a big selling point for me to I downloaded the demo to check it out.

First I have noticed that the manual does not specify m2ts as a SmartRender format.

But native files from my Canon HF100 will *kind of* SmartRender. That is V9 will smartrender until it detects the first change in the native file. After that all bets are off and everything get recompressed regardless if it was changed or not.

If I put two clips in the timeline with a 1 second crossfade norecompession rendering will happen until the crossfade. After that the entire second clip (or anything to follow) is recompressed.

Kind of makes SmartRender useless.

- Mark

Thats not good - it won't save much rendering time for me then - I normally have a dozen or more events togeither with crossfades of some sort.

It all works fine with the SR11. NO RECOMPRESS hits the screen... then it hits a transition and renders full.... then back to NO RECOMPRESS.

Maybe it's camera specific? I know that Canon/ Panasonic cams use a slightly different type of avchd than Sony.

Vegas is still not liking the 60p AVCHD footage coming from HMC150's. *sigh* Ongoing issue.....

I downloaded 64bit trial - but it doesn't appear to be skipping recompression on the AVCHD project I am trying - still slow as Methusula - I enabled no recompress on Options - preferences - general tab - is there something else I need to do? Help files don't work on 64bit trial.

My project starts with a protitle so maybe it's just not starting the no recompression?

never mind - I got it working -

Brad, what are you observing here?

Jerry

Vegas is still not liking the 60p AVCHD footage coming from HMC150's. *sigh* Ongoing issue.....

No smart rendering for me... using PAL 1080i from a Sony HDR-CX6. I have tried a number of clips straight from the cam with no effects/cuts etc. On some I get the no rendering message flash up for a second or so and then it renders. If I do export and bring this back into the project then it will smart render... but no luck on original clips. I wonder if it is a PAL format or camcorder issue???

And as Sony have not included the free Cineform codec in V9 I can not render to an intermediate.

Vegas is still not liking the 60p AVCHD footage coming from HMC150's. *sigh* Ongoing issue...

Brad:

That's a bummer and rules out using V9 for the HMC-150 60P footage for now.

I doubt it will smart render the AVCHD either. Have you tried?

Jeff

Ok, so this was the issue with 60p footage (that I was experiencing anyway) from the HMC150 and Sony Vegas. While this isn't MY clip, it shows it perfectly.....
http://www.vimeo.com/1958008

In V8, it would do this sometimes, but I have been able to overcome this issue either by creating Sony YUV intermediates (thanks Bob!) or.......as strange and dumb as this sounds.......save my project (that I've been working with the raw 60p .MTS files), exit out of Vegas, reopen it, and the files seem to playback fine. If I've been working on a project for a while it seemed like Vegas would get confused with the footage. (Memory issues? IDK) It worked though. I'm still new to a lot of this guys, so if I sound a little simple minded it's because I am. haha I've been able to make several videos now that incorporate 60p footage on a 24p timeline, slowed to 40% for that overcranked look.

Now, with question to V9. It's crazy. I'm only on the trial version as I haven't yet decided if there's too many thing that are different enough for me to take the plunge. Other than the UI looking extremely pleasing to my eyes. The other day, I tried to view some 60p footage on the timeline and I swore it did some strobing but I was checking stuff out quickly and hastily . I may not have had settings set properly. I don't remember.
Well, after some here have asked me questions about what I was experiencing in V9 with my HMC150 60p footage, I decided to open up several of my 60p clips on a 60p timeline. They ALL played from the timeline without a single hiccup like the video posted above! Not ONE of them. Each time the the indicator would go from one clip to the next, V9 would skip a couple frames as it tried to find itself again but the clips entirety would play fine. No weird strobing effect.

I'm not the most proficient yet with using all of Vegas, but is creating YUV "intermediates" the same as smart rendering? It's uncompressed right? If thats true, then yes, I have done that with the AVCHD files.

One question about V9 though. When I do most of my viewing in the preview, it's on "Preview-half". When I was viewing the 60p stuff it was playing beautifully and with good clarity on that setting. When I would try to bump the preview window up to say "Good-full" it would hesitate and then go right back to "Preview-half" and continue. Why is that?

If you guys want me to experiment with more stuff, let me know and just tell me what to do. I'm definitely open ears to what everyone else is trying. I WANT to like V9 and my money is burning a hole in my pocket. haha

"I'm not the most proficient yet with using all of Vegas, but is creating YUV "intermediates" the same as smart rendering?

No.
"Smart rendering" is actually a term that Ulead started. In Vegas it's called "no recompress rendering"

The encoder does its job and renders (or rewrites) your video but it will also look ahead of itself for parts of the timeline (or original clip) that have not changed and don't need rendering. If it should see something that hasn't changed... and doesn't need changing or rewriting... then it will switch to sort of a 'copy mode' if you will, and COPY that section of the video instead of rewriting it.

In order for Vegas to rewrite frames that you have changed... it must uncompress them, make the necessary changes... and then recompress..... it's this recompressing that causes a loss of quality... so if the encoder can simply COPY chunks of video that don't need decompressing/recompressing.... then less quality is lost and less rnedering time is required.

"is creating YUV "intermediates" the same as smart rendering?"

No. An intermediate is (or should be) less lossy than the source material. Oddly enough it might not even be as high a quality as the source and still yield benefits. The use of Digital Intermediates in the film world is a good example. No one would remotely suggest a 2K (DI) is remotely as good as what's on the original camera negative. Thing is though if a lot of FX or CGI work is being done that could involve several steps of optical printing then the output working with a DI is going to be better as less loss of image quality will occur during processing.

There's other reasons to use an intermediate in the video world. What the camera acquired might be highly compressed and impose large CPU overhead to playback. Use of a good intermediate avoids this.

The idea of No Recompress is a good one in theory. Most of the intraframe compression codecs are very lossy, No Recompress attempts to avoid this by not recompressing anything that doesn't need to be altered. It's not foolproof though. Most intraframe codecs specify a fixed length GOP and it's impossible to maintain that unless all edits are made at GOP boundaries. The output with differing non compliant length GOPs might be fine or not, it may work 99% of the time.

Bob.

Ok, I read and amd lost in that explanation - however - one minor tweek that would be nice in the no recompress rendering is changing more quickly to not recompressing after an effect or transition etc that requires it, right now the delay to switch back is signfifcant enough that a project with may short events with transitions / effects will never see the benefit of this. It's great for pretty long events - short ones it's just not going to be much help - most of my videos are a compliation of short events, not long ones.

srode,

Exactly. Once the edit is out of the affected GOP it seems as though SmartRender could continue.

- Mark

I'll let all you guinea pigs be the early adopters. As always, Sony uses these trial downloads as the final round of beta testing.

Maybe I'll be onboard with version b or c.

Well I ran a test on one of my more complicated projects - 17 3/4 minutes consisting of 32 events with 4 video effects (short ones) and 2 pro titles rendered to AVCHD 1920x1080 with cross fades of 1.3 seconds between each event 32bit floating poing full range interlaced and it took 56 minutes to complete or about 3x real time - which is much better than the same project in 8.0c with similar settings (one less fx - I threw in a glint in the 9.0 render) took about 7.5x to complete.

By comparison I took a 13 minute simple project with about 7 cross fades and no Video FX in under real time (12.5 minutes) to complete.

So I was a bit hasty - it's more than twice as fast on a more complex project - not complaining - its a great improvement - just an opportunity for more speed if it took less time to kick into 'no recompress' rendering mode.

"Exactly. Once the edit is out of the affected GOP it seems as though SmartRender could continue."

It does, but not exactly when it is finished with the transition. I noticed that the "smartrender" stops about 20 or 30 frames before the transition and then begins again about 200 or 300 frames after the transition has been rendered. This may have something to do with the gop being affected by the transition and that effect rippling down the line a little until that gop can be closed and the encoder is back in sync with the next one. This is just a guess mind you.