Workaround for AVCHD rendering?

bskousen wrote on 12/10/2008, 9:21 PM
I know everyone has been having problems doing full 1080p rendering of AVCHD files. I know I have successfully rendered 720p, but not 1080p. I have a Sony SR-11 HD camcorder which takes beautiful HD 1080i. Until Sony decides to fix the bug, is there a workaround to the problem? Has anyone rendered in uncompressed avi and then used DVD Architect Studio 4.5 to make an AVCHD DVD to be viewed on a Blu-Ray player? How massive would 20 minutes worth take up on a hard drive? I would really like Vegas Movie Studio to work. I've used VideoStudio 11 & 12; both of which have glitches regarding AVCHD files.

Comments

Eugenia wrote on 12/10/2008, 10:43 PM
Use my tutorial on my blog on how to create 1080i files for AVCHD disks. It works for me. I have linked from here a couple of times, so I won't link it again to not sound like an ad or something...
Stasoid wrote on 12/10/2008, 10:54 PM
20 minutes of uncompressed 1080i avi will be just over a 100GB
zibe wrote on 12/12/2008, 3:45 AM
Eugenia, why don't you just give the link again? I browsed this forum as well as your blog but coudn't find this tutorial. Perhaps I'm blind...
Eugenia wrote on 12/12/2008, 6:14 AM
http://eugenia.gnomefiles.org/2008/02/23/create-blu-ray-video-in-plain-dvds-for-free/
bskousen wrote on 12/12/2008, 7:50 AM
I appreciate the link. Is it possible in Vegas Studio Premium 9.0 to render edited AVCHD files from my Sony SR-11 as an uncompressed avi file and then bring it back into Vegas and create the AVCHD DVD without going to outside software programs? Or is there a bug in Vegas that wouldn't allow this to be done properly? As I said before, Sony seems to render 720p AVCHD files just fine (although very slowly compared to VideoStudio X2), but completely chokes on 1080p files. I know this is a bug and would hope that Sony fixes it as soon as possible.
zibe wrote on 12/14/2008, 11:03 AM
Sony has acknowledged the AVCHD render crash problem and it has been escalated to the development team. So perhaps in the next release it will be fixed, or then not....

Meanwhile I've bee fighting to find any reasonable simple workaround, and now I think I found one.

I had a 24 minute project to render, and it always crashed, hung or ended in an error box before the render was complete. This usually happened somewhere between 40-80% of the task.

Then I decided to render in it 3 chunks, each less than 10 minutes of scenes. This succeeded in first try. All I had to do then was to combine the three resulting streams into one.

First I did it with Vegas itself. Created a new project with those 3 streams as scenes, and rerendered. To my surprice it completed succesfully. Only that rerender took another 3 hours or so...

But then I found a complete free tool, TsRemux (use Google). It originally is intended to trim existing streams and remux the result, but it also can adjust TS headers after a rude file merge.

So, first I copied the three streams into one file in DOS-window:
copy /b file1.m2ts+file2.m2ts+file3.m2ts all.m2ts
Then drag and drop all.m2ts into TsRemux, define output file name and click "Remux".

It took just a few minutes to copy and remux those files. So far I have not found any problems with the resulting stream. It plays just fine where ever I have tried it.

Finally after a couple of months of fighting with this project, I have the result in one uncorrupt file. This workaround is good for me while waiting a permanent fix from Sony...
HaveBlue wrote on 12/28/2008, 8:29 AM
So I'm late to the party and trying to orient myself. Movie Studio Platinum won't create working BD5 or BD9 disks? Is this due to an AVCHD rendering problem? Yes I've been pulling my hair out creating coasters. They look like udf2.5 disks with all the right files in the right places but no go. With fiddling, I've been creating AVCHD disks with my Nero7. Have I just wasted money on Sony MS Plat? Sony can't create a disk on a standard they invented?

I'm reduced to exporting from MSP to Nero7. Here's how I do it. Import and edit my footage in MSP. Set the project and Render As settings all the same as the source footage, (1440x1080 60i HDV in my case) I then do a "renderless" output to m2t. Open NeroVision, create a new DVD project (AVCHD), drop the Sony output in, go through the disk menus and burn a disk. Actually I can just capture with HDVsplit and edit with Nero Vision too as I have been but I guess I'll keep MSP for the all the features it has like PP. Shame half the program doesn't work. Reminds me of Pinnacle Studio where it has a lot of features but half of them are unusable.