cgould wrote:I see on the HD Power Pack info, it supports M2TS format import (eg from HD harddisk camcorders.)
"M2TS File Import
Use the ¡§Insert Video¡¨ function to import m2ts files directly from your AVCHD disc, hard drive, or memory card camcorder."
However, does this mean it now supports HDV M2T files? (effectively native format of HDV tape, not plain MPG2; AVC is also MPEG4 not2))?
Or only harddisk files?
And if it does support M2T HDV, does it now support timestamp-based scene splitting? (if not, but it does support M2T files w/o converting to MPG2 HD, I can use HDVSplit.77 to capture scenes ok)
I'd try it on the trial version, but of course the power pack won't apply to trial version...
Edit:
on other forum thread, seems like the HD powerpacks for VS11+ and MF6+ do allow M2T HDV "insert" or import, so this may be very key for me... I'm not 100% clear if it's direct support, or it still converts to MPG2...
also, both would now do the 3xDVD authoring, eg HD on DVD-R/DL...
unclear if that is only MPG2, or VC1/WMV-HD support? It seems will do AVCHD or H.264 for bluray players..
I went ahead and purchased VS11+ (w/ power pack) based on info here so far, needing to test these out...
VS11+ w/ 11.5 HD power pack, DOES directly load/insert/edit and otherwise directly operate on HDV M2T files! (I captured M2T from HDVsplit to get scene detection; there is still no timestamp-based scene detection in VS11+ for HDV, only image content. At least this makes HDVsplit usable.)
However,
working w/ M2T is VERY slow (takes a few seconds per each clip to "think" about them each operation, eg insert to bin, insert to timeline, program start, etc)- that is a large annoyance, especially w/ hundreds of clips, but much faster than actually converting each to MPG2 as MSPro did. Note that this is still this slow even on a quad-core 2.4GHz CPU w/ SATA drives.
The
3x HDV-DVD on DVD-5/9 workflow appears to only support HD MPG2, however, not any more advanced codecs (vc1/h.264), which defeats the purpose a bit... with such smaller disk capacity, I need better compression to fit eg near an hour per disk. I can render down to 19Mbps HDV, but that loses quality...
as noted in some other threads, even if VS11+ supported this type of authoring, I'm not clear HDDVD players would accept it though (eg VC1 or H.264 on 3x dvd5/9), so this may not be a fault of VS11+; but I would very much like to be able to at least test it.
Given this, I would tend to lean away from 3xDVD/HD-DVD content authoring, unless I was satisfied with 19Mbps HDV quality.
I tried making an AVCHD encoding and disk, however the resulting HDMV H.264 file is not playable in anything except VS11+ itself? (not in the included WinDVD8 Silver, nor even in trial WinDVD8 Platinum, which is strange.)
The AVCHD disk authoring workflow also won't let me author to "harddisk folders", only burn to disk, which defeats my testing. (I'm unclear if WinDVD8 platinum would play off disk anyway since it says does not support BD/HD-DVD disk playing, just files, which is very annoying? I can't test this support w/o being able to author to hdd folders, so I'm stuck in a catch-22!)
The AVCHD encoding seemed very fast at least, eg 15-17mins for a 5 minute HDV clip (encoding to NTSC-DVD 7Mbps took 8 minutes); WMV9 encoding was horribly slow even on my quadcore, over 45minutes, so 9x realtime. That is horrible and unacceptable. Not sure if something was wrong on the codec profile or? I tried both the plain 1080/30p High builtin profile as well as customized 1080/60i 1-pass, same horribly slow encoding.
So far, I am resigned to making test HD-DVD authoring w/ HD MPG2, lowered to 19Mbps to fit 1hr/DL disc... that encoding was decently fast.
However, I cannot get the HD DVD authoring section to skip re-encoding my file? I have it set to "do not convert compliant files", and have the project and source file and HDDVD MPG settings all matching at 19Mbps etc, as verified by the MPEG wizard... and it still goes about "converting video file". What am I / VS11 doing wrong?
This makes my workflow impossible again...
any advice? This is very frustrating!
I just want to make playable/archived HD copies of my home movies. Why is this so stupidly hard?
I can always just have plain loose MPG2 files floating around, and use my HD Tivo or some other HD network extender, but then I have no menus or chapter/bookmarks to jump to highlights etc...
