Render AVCHD 2 DVD: some video ends up slow motion

sonyuser-a1 wrote on 11/15/2008, 8:30 AM
I have a problem with many of my m2ts video clips (from Sony HDR-SR11) in Vegas Movie Studio (VMS) 9.0b. When editing, everything looks fine. However, when I render one of these problem clips to DVD, the resulting file will end up with the video playing in really slow motion (always starts at the same place). The audio plays back fine, but the video plays slowly and if this occurs near the end, I end up not even seeing the rest of the video portion (because of the slowdown). It appears as if VMS has a problem with many Sony AVCHD video clips. My workaround has been to place a lower resolution mpg file (converted successfully! using Sony Picture Motion Browser); then Movie Studio does not have this problem. My hardware is a new HP (6 gigs ram, quadcore, vista ultimate 64 bit, m9340f). This is frustrating, because the problem often cannot be seen until after the lengthy rendering. Project properties were set properly for the video type (HD 1080-60i template, 29.970 NTSC fps). NOTE: I can occasionally see this problem in VMS preview if I run VMS for a while, do edits--then it starts to slow down in the editor (always at the same place). The problem goes away when I restart VMS (but rendering still has this bug). Anyone else have similar problems?

Comments

Eugenia wrote on 11/15/2008, 2:16 PM
this sounds like a bug on vms, email sony with a bug report
sonyuser-a1 wrote on 11/17/2008, 6:37 PM
Unfortunately, the response was basically that the program is not supported on Vista 64 bit...
...
"We noticed that you chose "Vista - 64-bit" as your operating system. This particular Sony Creative Software program is not supported on any Windows Vista 64-bit operating systems. You may still submit your incident, but realize that we will be very limited in providing any kind of technical support on this issue. We strongly suggest that you install the software on a 32-bit version of Windows Vista to ensure maximum compatibility.

That being said, I recommend this work around if you are editing alot of AVCHD video clips on the timeline. Go to File > Render As. The Save As Type should be set to "Video For Windows (*.AVI)" and the Template should be set to "HDV 1080-60i". Now click Save. The files will be saved as an AVI that retains all the detail from the M2TS file."
...

I will try to render on a 32 bit machine , as well as the render to avi (instead of to wmv or dvd), and see what happens...
sonyuser-a1 wrote on 11/19/2008, 5:41 AM
Findings: same problem occurs on 32 bit machine. Same problem occurs when rendering to .avi Video for Windows as suggested by Tech supported (with the additional file size explosion: a 3 gig 25 minute .m2ts file becomes 180 gig .avi file)!

I believe the problem is in a minor flaw in the .m2ts files (that would be an intermittent hardware problem with my HDR-SR11 camcorder).

However, if Sony Media Browser software (came with camcorder for simple editing) can handle rendering such a file properly (renders to mpg without slowdown and video truncation), why can't Vegas Move Studio render the video properly. (or at least warn that it found a problem with the file and may not produce a properly rendered video)?