Has anyone tried Studio 12? Interested in AVCHD performance.

Similar thoughts. I would like to be able to edit and then save back in same format and then play on PS3. Dont seem to be able to achieve that with V11 at present despite trying to follow various different ideas on the net. I dont seem to be able to get any to work.

Studio 11 makes AVCHD movies on DVD media - my attempts worked fine on a Sony PDP-S300 and Panasonic DMP-BD30. I didn't try them on a PS3 though.

I upgraded to Studio 12 Ultimate having first been told by Pinnacle Technical Support that it supported smart-rendering for AVCHD. I was only told yesterday after I could not get it to work that smart rendering of AVCHD or HD does not work in Studio at this time and no timeline is available on when it might work in the future.
That being said Pinnacle Studio 12 Ultimate does otherwise work as you would expect.
I only have an Athlon 3000+ with 2GB of 333MHz DDR2 RAM and ATI X800 XT video card. Playing AVCHD on my machine is unsatisfactory using any player and Pinnacle Studio is no different. While the UI is responsive enough the lag on the preview frame can be up to 4 seconds. Please be clear the poor performance here is due to my under specified PC and not Studio.
The export options from Studio are a bit limited. You cannot "Make Movie" to an AVCHD file, however you have the option to make a disc either as AVCHD on DVD or on Bluray. You have no control on the audio format other than DD5.1 or DD2.0. From memory the audio format on the HF10 is DD2.0 at 256kbps, Studio produces 192kbps with no option to change.
I have successfully made such a 'disc' in a folder and extracted the .m2ts file and uploaded to my HF10 through the dreaded Pixela. The HF10 does not recognise the .m2ts file from Studio if transferred by other methods.
On my underpowered PC it takes 25 times real time to encode AVCHD, I've promised myself a high spec machine before the and of the year. Meanwhile I'm using Premiere to edit avisynth/vdub produced SD versions of my clips and then a 'bate and switch tactic' to get Premiere to render the HD versions of the clips.
I'm fond of Studio because it is great for mini-projects. Given the smart rendering end export limitations I'm going to moth-ball it for now. Hopefully by the time I get my new PC Pinnacle will have fixed the smart-rendering and added AVCHD file options. With a more powerful PC it would be a different story.

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Max
Canon HF-10, Canon S3IS and tons of stuff