poor quality play back on timeline

tonypco wrote on 3/11/2010, 5:19 AM

i am getting very choppy playback from my HD footage on the time line, i looked at the sony faq,s and it recomended the following,
1 place clip on time line
2 go to file, render as
3 set save as type to..video for windows
4 set template to HDV 1080-60i intermediate
5 click save
i did this and it didnt cure the choppy play back and the image quality went down , i have tried to reverse the settings to what they were but the image quality on the time line is still very poor
does any one have any answers to recovering the image quality and to eradicating the choppy play back

Comments

OhMyGosh wrote on 3/11/2010, 6:46 AM

Hi Tony,
Can you tell us about your system. It takes a bit of a computer to be able to watch HD smoothly. Also, in the preview window, click on the preview button and choose 'Draft' > 'Quarter' and see if that helps with the choppiness. Let us know. Cin

tonypco wrote on 3/11/2010, 7:38 AM

hi and thanks for replying
my system is as follows..HP pavilion version 6 with an intellcore 2 duo cpu running at 2.4 ghz, and 3 meg of ram, the camera is an hitachi full hd saving footage to a 4gb sd card ,the data on the card is stored as a .mov file and i think the full hd is also called h264 mov

thays as much info as i have, once again thanks for your help
tony

OhMyGosh wrote on 3/11/2010, 10:10 AM

Hi Tony,
Not a computer whiz, but after checking Intel's site, I don't believe you have near enough computer for the job (as far as no choppieness). h264 is notorious for being difficult to work with. Did you change your preview to 'Draft' to see if that helps? Also, if there is just a portion that you want to see 'real time', go to 'tools' and either 'selectively prerender video' or 'build dynamic RAM preview.' As far as your original footage, it should still be there (where ever you had it) even after you rendered your footage to another format (I think). If not, I guess redownload. Cin

musicvid10 wrote on 3/11/2010, 11:03 AM

Tony,
Rendering to an uncompressed intermediate as you did is not going to improve your preview. Search the forums and knowledgebase for more information on "intermediate" and "proxy" render alternatives if the tips below do not help you enough.

Follow these tips to optimize preview playback. They may not fix it in your case (a quad or "i" series cpu is often necessary), as was suggested.

-- Match your Project Properties to your media. You do this by clicking the yellow "folder" icon in the dialog and selecting one of your media files.

-- In the Preview window, turn off "Scale to fit Preview."

-- Reduce your preview window size to force a smaller display.

-- In the Preview window, turn off "Simulate Device Aspect." The preview will look squished, but it will play back more smoothly.

-- Set your Preview display to "Preview, Auto"

-- Shut down running applications and processes, esp. antivirus, process monitoring, and anything putting a burden on your cpu.

As mentioned, AVCHD places a large demand on your cpu, and if it can't keep up, well . . . it can't keep up.

tonypco wrote on 3/12/2010, 1:05 AM

thanks to musicvid and ohmygosh for the assistance, i have altered the settings in vegas as recomended but to no avail, so as you both said its a faster cpu , i think my system will take a 3ghz upgrade which is what the camera spec recomends, however just a point to consider, the camera ( hitachi DZHV1074 ) came with a bit of software on a cd which i loaded, it allows you to view your footage and stitch it together on a timeline, no other editing facilitys are provided but when you run it the footage plays as smooth as silk, am i wrong in thinking that the cpu would have to render it for viewing in the same way as in vegas or is it letting me view it as i would on my hd tv............non the less folks thanks for your help

tony