VMS 10: rendering in AVCHD; do not use SONY AVC

pierreontheair wrote on 7/29/2010, 5:54 AM
Hello,

I have just spent about one week getting crazy with that, so thought I'd share my findings:

When rendering AVCHD movies (1440x1080 50i in my case), you have to use the MainConcept profile, which CAN be customized to 1080i (default settings show very small resolutions only, so initially I did not consider it).

Using the Sony AVC profile for AVCHD DOES NOT WORK. IT IS BROKEN. In my case, I had no crashes, but the rendered file was not watchable, in all sort of ways. Other strange thing is that it would only use abou 50% of CPU, even though I checked the box not to use the GPU.

I would hope that Sony makes a note of that and fixes the bug or disables this broken codec, or at least mentions this in its knowledgebase.

Other than that, I must say the SW works very well and is very fluid.

Best,

Pierre

Comments

TOG62 wrote on 7/29/2010, 7:11 AM
I have used Sony AVC and not noticed any problems. What sort of thing are you experiencing, apart from CPU usage?
originalbob wrote on 7/29/2010, 7:31 AM
I also have rendered several HD videos with Sony AVC. One is rendering as I write this. No problems.
Except, I have a dual core & renders take a l.o.n.g time (15 min. slide show at 10+ hours).
Where is it 'not watchable?' I brought some files into DVDAS and DVDAS crashed. But this has not happened recently.
bob f
pierreontheair wrote on 7/29/2010, 8:19 AM
After about 7min (out of a 20 min. clip), the video stutters like in slow motion (but audio still fine); I have noticed that prior to the 7 minutes, the video plays slightly faster than it should (20 seconds too fast after 5 minutes). Note that this happened only when I played the clip on my HTPC, which is W7 (64 bits) and with a Radeon GPU. The clip plays fine on the PC on which I created it (Vista 64 bits, Nvidia GPU). Really strange; this AVCHD "standard" is really still a mess.

In another case, the video had large blocks of pixels.

I read various other posts, where people experienced crashes while rendering with Sony AVC format only. I believe it is in this codec that Sony has implemented the GPU support for rendering; maybe that is where the issue lies, whereas MainConcept relies only on CPU for rendering.
corvid wrote on 7/29/2010, 8:30 AM
I have successfully rendered video using the Sony AVC profile both in VMS 9 and VMS 10; however, there are some problems during playback using Windows Media Player and other players. With VMS 9, after about a minute and a half the video starts to stutter and lag behind the audio. This gets worse as playback continues. The same thing happens with VMS 10 but seems to take about 3 minutes to become apparent. In both cases, the m2ts file can be fixed by processing with tsMuxeR, using default settings except changing the output to "M2TS muxing". Apparently there is some field that is missing or incorrect in the rendered file header which tsMuxeR fixes. It takes only a few seconds to process a 20 minute video, and the resulting m2ts plays perfectly.
Markk655 wrote on 7/29/2010, 9:33 AM
On my C2D (2.66 GHz, Vista 32, VMS 10), I take 1440x1080 AVCHD footage and make great looking video that plays on the PS3 and on my computer. Output is encoded by Sony codec 1440x1080/60i with AC3 5.1 encoding. It even streams via TVersity just fine.

What other settings are you using? Saving as m2ts or mp4? How are your other parameters in the final render set?
pierreontheair wrote on 7/29/2010, 10:17 AM
Using Mainconcept and saving in .mp4 solves the stuttering issue. However now I have the big blocks of pixels if I create interlaced AVCHD (even with MainConcept). Doing a progressive file everything is fine. Given the movie has some fast action, I prefer doing interlaced though.

If I disactivate the GPU accelaration (Radeon, AVIVO) the pixel blocks disappear! BUT, other interlaced AVCHD files, which I created with other SW (Nero) plays perfectly with GPU acceleration on. So there is a compatibility issue between Vegas and Radeon.
I have tried both CBR and variable bitrates.
pierreontheair wrote on 7/29/2010, 10:22 AM
Another note:
The blocks of pixels do not appear immediately, but after I move back and forth a few time on the timeline (I use PowerDVD 8). It then quickly becomes unwatchable.
musicvid10 wrote on 7/29/2010, 11:27 AM
1440/1080 AVCHD playback on a computer is a crapshoot period, no matter what combination of software player and processor power you have. Quicktime player doesn't even support it.

Full AVCHD was developed primarily as an acquisition format. Just because one encoder's playback is different from another's on a particular player or system, is no indication there is anything "broken" with the codec.

If one scales one's delivery expectations back a bit, say to 720p30 (AVCHD Lite spec), playability on computer software players can be smooth as silk, even on modest systems like my dual-core notebook.

Sony AVC delivers compliant AVCHD and BD output. So saying there is something "broken" with it because of playback anomalies on your setup is incorrect.

Markk655 wrote on 7/29/2010, 7:40 PM
To echo musicvid, if it is a playback issue, itis really the playback software and (more likely) the hardware that can't keep up. Most times my 1440x1080 plays back fine in Nero Showtime or Splash Lite (one of the smoother players and free). But if you have other processes going on in the background, not much you can do about the stutters.
pierreontheair wrote on 7/29/2010, 11:30 PM
Thanks for your comments.
When I posted my initial comment, I thought that I had solved the issue and videos created with Mainconcepts were fine. I found out later about the blocks of pixels appearing in interlaced videos.

But this is definitely not a HW issue, as other AVCHD videos (1440x1080) play fine, and very smoothly on the same PC, with CPU utilization around 10%; no stutter whatsoever.
When I have the issue of the video created with Sony AVC going "slowmotion" after 7 minutes, CPU utilization remains very low.

For me this is really an issue of non-compatible formats. I know AVCHD codecs are complex, but after all these years, I thought (hoped) that some form of standard had emerged.

In any case I do not understand why rendering with Sony AVC only utilizes 50% of CPU (having ticked the box "do not use GPU"), when MainConcept uses 100%; there is something wrong.

I have been struggling with this AVCHD format for some years now, and this is getting very frustrating.
musicvid10 wrote on 7/29/2010, 11:33 PM
Can you upload somewhere an example of the Mainconcept-rendered video that is showing blocking? Post the rendering settings you used as well.
pierreontheair wrote on 7/30/2010, 1:01 PM
Not really; this is a 2GB file.

I just found out that if I change the profile from Main to Basic everything works. So maybe Radeon Avivo just does not work with Main Profile. I am not sure which Profile my other videos (which work) were encoded with; possibly they were encoded with Basic Profile (they were created with Nero, and I am not sure what Profile Nero encodes into). Problem with Basic Profile is that quality is clearly lower than with Main, so I am not so happy with this solution.
aquaholik wrote on 8/9/2010, 1:51 PM
I have successfully rendered video using the Sony AVC profile both in VMS 9 and VMS 10; however, there are some problems during playback using Windows Media Player and other players. With VMS 9, after about a minute and a half the video starts to stutter and lag behind the audio. This gets worse as playback continues. The same thing happens with VMS 10 but seems to take about 3 minutes to become apparent. In both cases, the m2ts file can be fixed by processing with tsMuxeR, using default settings except changing the output to "M2TS muxing". Apparently there is some field that is missing or incorrect in the rendered file header which tsMuxeR fixes. It takes only a few seconds to process a 20 minute video, and the resulting m2ts plays perfectly.

Thank You corvid!!!! I thought it's dejavu all over again with the sound being out of it sync when rendering to 1080p using Sony AVC profile and outputting to .m2ts file. Mine happened after about 7 minutes in a 28 minutes video. I tried using different player and different computer. The audio would be out of sync and I just can't jump fast forward without lag and audio sync problem. tsMuxeR fixed it all right. Not only that, there is no lag when I jump forward when playing back using Windows Media Player. It was lightning fast too.

The question I have is, If I used the .m2ts file in DVDAS5.0, do I need to apply the tsMuxeR first to ensure that my audio will be in sync when I want to create a 1920x1080i blu ray disc? Or is the problem only a playback software issue and VMS10 and DVDAS 5.0 will handle the rendered .m2ts file correctly when creating a blu ray disc.
aquaholik wrote on 8/14/2010, 11:37 AM
Sony AVC delivers compliant AVCHD and BD output. So saying there is something "broken" with it because of playback anomalies on your setup is incorrect.

I found out that musicvid is absolutely correct. Even though Windows Media Player has problem playing back the .m2ts files, there is nothing wrong with the file itself. I sent the .m2ts files that Windows Media Player has problem with to DVDA5 and it creates perfectly sync blue ray disc. You do have to run it through tsMuxer if you want fix the Windows Medial Player play back problem but keep the original rendered file to use in DVDA5. I found out today that DVDA5 will not handle the file that tsMuxer process without crashing.

See:
http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?MessageID=723739&Replies=0
shooter71 wrote on 1/22/2011, 7:00 AM
Has anyone else found that when they tsMuxeR their AVCHD file, that it ended up being shorter in length? My 30 minute video was reduced down by 90 seconds even though the start/stop clips were still present - I assume this means it was processed with a different rate. I used the default settings. Thx.