This seems to cost about the same as the Ulead program. Does anyone have experience with this, or better yet, with both? Weeding through reviews and features on the internet I'm finding it hard to figure out which is easier to use or has the greatest flexibility as far as useful features. I mainly try to do documentary style films (not home movies of my children growing up, etc.), so would like as many semi-pro features as I can get. I have an earlier version of Pinnacle which has crashed (after several hours of editing, so you can imagine the expletives coming from the editing room at that point!) more than once, not to mention features such as color balancing, sharpness, better sound, etc. requiring that I purchase additional "keys" from Pinnacle (which in my opinion should come with an editing program at the initial price in the first place). Obviously I need it to edit AVCHD as easily and quickly as possible (no conversion requirements and such).

I don't believe /any/ of the consumer editors can natively render back to AVCHD (which isn't, it would appear, a standard, unlike HDV... Sony and Panasonic came up with the format, and then diverged in implementation, and who knows what Canon's version is like -- which is why the Sony Vegas family can only process Sony's AVCHD as input).

So... Even if you can maneuver a timeline reasonably well (and that is more a capability of the CPU), the edited output /will/, in all likelihood, have to be converted to some other format.

Nero7 apparently can output AVCHD and BluRay authoring, but I've never heard it suggested as a serious NLE.

It can output AVCHD, however when I attempted to take a disc, it said the estimate time to process was 3 days. Now maybe that is a product of my computer only being a P4 2.66 but still, ouch, that is basically useless. But I'll try it again when I get my new quad core system.

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Sony UX1 HD camcorder owner.

What type of effects/filters had you applied...

My routine estimate is that, as HDV (I'm sorry, but I would prefer to never touch an AVCHD camera) is 4.5 times standard definition DV, any rendering will take about 4.5 times the equivalent length DV (and maybe more if the source file is in a compressed format, since it is now doing decompress:apply effects:compress.

I've also had SD DV renders take 12 hours for a 1 hour source (unsharp masking is a CPU hog). If that had been HDV, I'd be looking at 2 to 3 days. This, on a 3.4GHz P4HT!

Final rendering is never fast -- except in those few cases where the NLE can perform "smart rendering"... Most support that for simple DV as each frame is independent, so they just copy unmodified frames as is. Few do it for MPEG formats -- especially if the format standard specifies a particular GoP size... Deleting one frame means all subsequent frames must be decoded, "shifted left" by one frame position, and reencoded. Smart rendering could be done if the the encoder is smart enough to render a short GoP packet, leaving the rest unchanged.

I don't worry about "smart rendering" as even something as minor sounding as a brightness/contrast adjustment requires modifying each frame.

I have had sucess with avchd movies, i have made about 3 movies 30-40 minutes in length. the time to render has been 3-4 hours. this is on a quadcore 2.4ghz with 3 gig of ram. even sd movies take a while. Them movies come out good, I am still learning how to add in transitions and efeects. lots of fun.

I'm in need of a new PC as well. I can barely play the AVCHD movies on my P4 2.8Ghz, but for editting it's too slow. Might buy a Quadcore around Christmass.

I've also tried the newest Ulead VideoStudio, because it contains a "smart proxy" system, which sounds a whole lot better than it actually is. It makes a MPEG2 copy of your AVCHD files for editting and uses the orginal AVCHD files in the rendering process. It makes editting a bit more possible, but it's not that user friendly and rendering still takes ages.

Can someone help me? I've downloaded a 30 day free trial of Ulead Video Studio 11 Plus, which has support AVCHD editing, but I'm at a loss as to how to import a file into the timeline or program at all! It just won't recognize .m2ts files! Any suggestions?

From the Ulead FAQ:

Q: When I import video from an AVCHD camcorder, is there anything I need to watch out for?

A: If you wish to capture the video from your camcorder (Hard-dsc or DVD) you should start VideoStudio first, then connect your device. In the capture step, select “Import from DVD/DVD-VR” and select your device – it will usually show up with a drive letter like a hard drive. Then click import, and it will offer you the choice to select the clips that you want to import and edit.

Zyphrax,

Thanks for this information, but I guess I did'nt make myself clear. My fault.The files I'm trying to get into the program are already on my pc and not on the camera anymore!

Ah, I see. The Sony software copies the videos to your computer under differrent filenames, however the files are not transcoded and are exactly the same as on your camera.

Maybe two solutions:
1. Copy the .m2ts files back to your camera, I believe they should have the .m2t extension on your camera.

or

2. Rename the files on your harddisk to .m2t, and follow the steps from the FAQ. And browse to C:\..... (the folder where you keep your local copies).

It isn't that userfriendly, but it might work. I'm not sure that ".m2t" is the right extension. But you can easily check that by browsing your camera's storage, and having a look at the filenames.

Good luck.

Zyphrax,

I've tried renaming the file extensions .avi, .mov .mpg4 and several other things: Yeah !! You guessed ! In real frustration ! I gotta laugh myself ! This includes .mts, but not .m2t as you suggest!
I'll try it and see what happens !
But what a great idea! Putting the files back onto the camera. Now why on earth did'nt I think of that??
But surely there has got to be a way of getting these files into the software from the pc itself. This software is supposed to edit AVCHD afterall.
Hmmm !

Cheers

I never could get Ulead to recognize files already on my computer either. No amount of playing with extensions made it work. On their help site, it only gives the process for capturing from camera or from a DVD created by a camcorder that records directly to DVD. I gave up on it and went to Pinnacle.

Does anyone have problems getting the thumbnails to display properly in the PMB software after capture from an SR12? I find I can't even play it through the PMB after capture to my hard drive.

I can access those files and play it fine in WMP, but not PMB. My friend has exactly the same issues with his PMB. Actually the only way I can get it to play after capture is to right click on a thumbnail and say 'trim'. That opens a smaller window and the video does play. Very weird.

I had the same issue and the solution I found was to uninstall all other codec packs and any codec for AVCHD. Then rerun the updater that generates the thumbnails.

I d have these problems in Windows Vista Ultimate x64, but not on laptops wit Vista Business x86 and Windows XP Professional SP3.