Smart trimming and combining AVCHD clips

PeterDuke wrote on 8/30/2010, 6:18 PM

Vegas Pro 9.0c, but not 9.0d or 9.0e, will smart render AVCHD (H.264) clips that have not been touched in any way (although some people have said not always). Until such time as Vegas provides full smart rendering of AVCHD, you may find these two products helpful for smart trimming and combining AVCHD clips:

Smart Cutter Ps/Ts (PORTABLE) Ver 1.2.8f
http://www.fame-ring.com/products.html

VideoReDo TVsuite version 4 (pre-release only at this stage).
http://www.videoredo.net/msgBoard/showthread.php?t=15759

If the object is to make AVCHD discs or Blu-ray discs, it is desirable for best quality (and to save rendering time) to not have to transcode AVCHD unnecessarily.

Comments

LSHorwitz wrote on 8/31/2010, 12:38 AM

Thanks Peter for posting this. To add a bit more info for AVCHD editors -

Although I recognize that this forum is for Sony Vegas users, I want to point out that several AVCHD editing programs provide 'smart rendering', thus saving considerable time and maintaining original image quality without recompression. These are relatively low cost, consumer/prosumer products selling for less than $100, and are thus not a true replacement for Vegas for most professional users, but they do speed up the editing and creation of BluRay and AVCHD disks profoundly when light editing and few effects are being used. They add considerable editing capability to the two programs Peter identified, which are primarily used for cuts-only, trimming, or simple joins of clips.

Specifically, the following 5 PC programs are AVCHD-capable NLEs which offer smart rendering (and have done so for a couple years or longer!):

--Nero Vision

--Cyberlink Power Director

--Corel (formerly Ulead) VideoStudio

--Ulead DVD Movie Factory

--multiAVCHD

Other PC programs such as Edius Neo (Grass Valley), TMPG Express, and others use nVidia CUDA to substantially accelerate rendering, and a couple also add yet another speed-up of rendering with SpursEngine cell co-processors.

It is not at all clear what Sony has in mind for Vegas, since smart rendering, CUDA acceleration, or SpursEngine support have never been advertised for the Vegas Pro suite. Only recently in the latest version 10 of the Sony consumer software has CUDA been incorporated.

Perhaps one of these years Sony will add some or all of these features to Vegas Pro.......

PeterDuke wrote on 8/31/2010, 1:22 AM

Bear in mind that if you have modified the content of a clip, you will have to re-render it anyway, so you will gain no quality advantage using the other video editors instead of Vegas plus say VideoReDo; only a (possibly considerable) advantage of convenience and editing time.

Note that if you are using Vegas to do your main editing, before you apply a transition you should first split any clip or clips with unmodified content into two, using VideoReDo etc., say one second from the end where the transition is to go, so that the whole clip is not re-rendered, only the transition portion.

Wouldn't it be nice if Vegas did all this for you?

musicvid10 wrote on 8/31/2010, 1:57 AM

"Wouldn't it be nice if Vegas did all this for you?"

It would, but keep in mind what we're asking it to do.
What makes VRD (and some of the others mentioned) so neat is that they re-index the GOPs on the fly. Considering that AVC can have a GOP that is hundreds of frames in length, and all the extra considerations B-frames throw into the soup, the task is nontrivial, even for the splitter/joiners and lightweight editors mentioned.
So adding that functionality to a primary editor like Vegas is probably some time away.

The VRD h264 project has been in beta for a long time now, but I'm still hopeful. I use my VRD Plus as often as I use Vegas. I'll have to try that other app you mentioned.