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Sektionschef,

Have you looked at Womble MVW or DVD? (Not VCR) These provide about the same functionality as VS and the smartrendering works without the glitches. In fact, the overall quality of the finished product is nearly perfect. Of course you do not have the functionality of MSP8 or Vegas but neither does VS. I do not know which encoder they use.

Lets hope MainConcept will come out with a plugin/update version for other editors!

bsuratt wrote:Sektionschef,

Have you looked at Womble MVW or DVD? (Not VCR) These provide about the same functionality as VS and the smartrendering works without the glitches.

Thanks for your answer.
Yes, I have worked with Womble mpeg2 video wizard but is has far less features than VS11.
Especially there are no overlay tracks and the handling is very bad.
But you are right, womble handles the smartrendering perfect.
Regards
Sektionschef

My heavens, Sektionschef, I can't think of a single reason why anybody would want to spend such an obscene amount of money on another MainConcept product without testing in advance.

Can you imagine the frustration of buying one of the Adobe products and then shelling out for the MainConcept plug-in and then finding out it does the same thing we're complaining about here with the Corel video editing products?

If somebody has tested the plug-in, please chime in and save us from such unbearable grief.

Regards,

Jerry Jones
http://www.jonesgroup.net

Sektionschef wrote:However, there is a small hope for you:
Mainconcept offers a mpeg2 plugin for Premiere Pro and Elements that should support smartrendering even for HD(see here: http://www.mainconcept.com/site/consume ... -7862.html).
It is very expensive. I have never tested it, hopfully they have already removed this bug in their own product...Regards
Sektionschef

Jerry my friend, Many Thanks again for your post.
I do not own Pinnacle Studio but I was also visiting the Pinnacle forum and asked someone whether smartrendering is supported or not.
This is the link of the thread:
http://forums.pinnaclesys.com/forums/thread/19012.aspx
Unfortunately it is in german language, I assume you can't read it.
I got the answer that Pinnacle Studio supports smartrendering since Version 9.
They also told me there that you will not find a setting to explicitely enable smartrendering, instead Studio will automatically enable smartrendering in case the properties of the source video file matches to the specified settings of the output format.
Further I asked whether smartrendering will also work if the source material is 704X576 and because they didn't know it the user IngolfZ made a short test for me.
Afterwards he told me that sr does not work @704X576, the rendering speed was only 25fps. In comparisson he tried a 720X576 file which reached a rendering speed of 200fps!!! and I was told that Studio 11 did a smartrendering!!!!

Now I don't understand why your Studio11 package does not smartrender??? But again, I do not own Pinnacle software so I can only tell you what I was told in the forum.

Regarding Final Cut Pro:
I also visit a lot of camcorder forums and there I could often read that mpeg2 files make a lot of problems on Apple computers. I don't know Final Cut Pro in detail so you may be right that it does support smartrendering. However, I don't want to buy an Apple Computer for this and I assume that there isn't a "Windows-Version" available, is it?
Do you know is there some kind of Apple OS-Emulation software available that turns any PC into a Mac??? Then I could evaluate Final Cut Pro.
Do you already have a Apple Computer???

Regarding mainconcept plugin:
Yes, its defenitely too expensive and I wouldn't trust them whether it works OK or not. To be honest, we don't know whether the problem in VS11 comes from the mainconcept encoder or from any other Ulead-part so it could also be that the premiere plugin works correct.
On the other hand Mainconcept also offers a plugin for premiere Elements which is "only "$66(see http://www.mainconcept.com/site/consume ... -6887.html)
But you are right, one should be warned and only buy it after the product was evaluated in detail.

So what are you going to do now???
At the moment I use Magix software but I have disabled smartrendering.
On my Camcorder I use the max. Bitrate of 10Mbps(XP-Mode) which reduces the quality loss from reencoding a little bit.
In addition I have forwarded the smartrendering problem to Magix tech support and I hope that they will bring out a patch soon.
In comparisson Magix brings out much more patches than Ulead per year. This lets me hope that they will fix this problem soon(cross my fingers).
Regards
Sektionschef

Hi Jerry
Perhaps smartrendering with Pinnacle Software only works with some certain mpeg2 files. I mean perhaps sr will not work if the mpeg2 file includes AC3 sound or doesn't be in widescreen or what ever.
You could post one of your video files to the user that reported that sr is working and ask him to do the same test with your file.

Inbetween I search for a Mac emulator and found a free one here:
http://www.emulators.com/
Do you think that Final Cut Pro will run with on a PC with this emulator?
Regards
Sektionschef

One thing that is quite disturbing about the inability of so many PC platform consumer video editing programs to properly edit long GOP MPEG-2 with smart render is that they have had years to work on it... years.

Jerry Jones
http://www.jonesgroup.net

Yes, and look at the Camcorder market.
More and more mpeg2 camcorder(miniDVD,HDD,memorycard) are coming out while the number of miniDV models decreases.
Again, I am very surprised that just a few people have run into this problem so far.
Jerry, if you plan to test FinalCutPro then please let me know your results.
Regards
Sektionschef

Since I'm considering buying a camcorder soon...should I avoid camcorders that creat mpeg2 files or should I jut turn smartrendering off when creating a DVD?

I'm a little more confused now.

If you buy a standard definition camcorder that records to a long GOP format (a DVD disc camcorder as an example), you can successfully edit the standard definition MPEG-2 files by first converting them to DV .avi files for editing.

If you buy a camcorder that records to high definition long GOP formats such as HDV (tape) or AVCHD (multiple disc/disk formats), you can buy Cineform's Neo HDV and convert the long GOP source files to Cineform .avi files that are far easier to edit with great quality.

I've posted my experience here:

http://phpbb.ulead.com.tw/EN/viewtopic. ... 702#123702

Jerry Jones
http://www.jonesgroup.net

Clevo wrote:...should I avoid camcorders that creat mpeg2 files

YESSSS!!! Do NOT buy any camcorders that record to mpeg2 format.
At least in case you do not want High Definition!
Choose a miniDV Model instead!
I don't know how much the quality loss is when editing HD mpeg2 material without smartrendering but you will defenitely have a quality loss.
Regards
Sektionschef

Sektionschef wrote:

Clevo wrote:...should I avoid camcorders that creat mpeg2 files

YESSSS!!! Do NOT buy any camcorders that record to mpeg2 format.
At least in case you do not want High Definition!
Choose a miniDV Model instead!
I don't know how much the quality loss is when editing HD mpeg2 material without smartrendering but you will defenitely have a quality loss.
Regards
Sektionschef

But MiniDV camcorders output in a mpeg2 format too... some of the models I have been looking at anyway.

Camcorders that record to "MiniDV" cassette tape in standard definition do not support MPEG-2 output.

Of course, HDV camcorders record high definition MPEG-2 to "MiniDV" cassette tapes.

Jerry Jones
http://www.jonesgroup.net

Clevo wrote:But MiniDV camcorders output in a mpeg2 format too... some of the models I have been looking at anyway.

Jerry Jones wrote:If you buy a standard definition camcorder that records to a long GOP format (a DVD disc camcorder as an example), you can successfully edit the standard definition MPEG-2 files by first converting them to DV .avi files for editing.......

Sorry but I have to disagree if your ultimate aim is to produce a DVD video Disc. If your source files are in MPEG2 format then you are better off keeping them in MPEG2 format because this is the format that they will ultimately have to be in to produce your DVD.

Every time you convert from one format to another you risk introducing issues such as loss of quality and audio/video synchronisation.
Some formats are difficult to edit and require conversion, these are the highly compressed formats such as MPEG4 DivX and Xvid.

The easiest format to work with is of course DV (Digital Video) but you CAN edit MPEG2 - you just need to take more care to ensure that you do not introduce audio/video sunchronisation problems. From my experience this usually occurs where transitions are inserted.

The aim should be to render the least number of times preferably once.
For more details please view My Suggested Workflow

Steve,

Apparently, you didn't get the memo.

This seems to be another example of you not being aware of what's going wrong with the software.

There's a bug in VideoStudio and in MediaStudio Pro, OK?

It's an MPEG-2 smart render bug.

This bug is simple to confirm.

1. Import a DVD camcorder MPEG-2 file;

2. Adjust your VideoStudio/MediaStudio project settings to match the properties of your DVD camcorder MPEG-2 source file;

3. Insert a title into the timeline over the MPEG-2 source file;

4. Render out the timeline to file using the "SAME AS PROJECT SETTINGS" export option to create a smart rendered MPEG-2 file on your computer's hard disk.

5. Play the file.

6. Observe the video carefully immediately after the title leaves the screen and you should then observe the bug, which is a slight 'bump' or 'distortion' where the edit is being capped off by an I-frame.

This appears to be a MainConcept SDK bug because the Magix software also relies on the MainConcept SDK.

The same bug can be observed in the Magix software except that the distortion in the Magix software appears at the beginning of where a title is inserted.

The bottom line is that smart render isn't working properly for MPEG-2 files and numerous individuals have posted to this forum complaining about this issue, which makes your reply here seem especially astonishing.

If one turns off the smart render, the distortions do not appear.

Or if one renders the MPEG source file to be an "I-Frame only" MPEG-2 file, then the distortion does not appear.

But the problem then is that each frame of the MPEG file has been subjected to yet another round of high compression.

Transcoding to DV .avi also degrades quality, but if one has a lot of layering and other such editing to perform, then transcoding to DV .avi makes more sense than using a broken smart render feature or -- worse -- subjecting a clip to multiple instances of MPEG-2 compression.

Jerry Jones
http://www.jonesgroup.net

sjj1805 wrote:Sorry but I have to disagree if your ultimate aim is to produce a DVD video Disc. If your source files are in MPEG2 format then you are better off keeping them in MPEG2 format because this is the format that they will ultimately have to be in to produce your DVD.