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Howdy all, I just got back from vacation with the Sony HDR-SR12 which is AVCDH.

I've enabled the smartproxy icon and it seems to be working (I'm getting the little icons on my clips.) My playback in project mode especially is choppy and slow. Shouldn't smartproxy take care of that? I have a decent enough system.

Is their a tutorial somewhere concerning smartproxy?

Thanks! ~Ken

I don't think anyone has done a SmartProxy tutorial unfortunately, and it's not something I use. However, I don't think that in Project mode it plays back the standard definition proxy files.

In effect, in Project mode, Video Studio tries to give an idea of what the final view will be, sort of doing a temporary render on the fly... And for what it's worth, I find that even with my Quad, when I am editing AVCHD or even the much less demanding HDV format, playback in Project mode (without SmartProxy enabled, remember) is very choppy. I have learned to ignore this and simply look to see that all the main elements of my editing are there. And when I render it out to a new file or burn to a AVCHD hybrid disc, the motion is smooth and quality excellent.

So, then what's the point?

The end point is to have edited AVCHD that will play smoothly in the final product... Your computer certainly should be able to do that. But AVCHD is an incredibly demanding format, and many people don't even have sufficiently well-resourced computers to be able to even play AVCHD smoothly, let alone edit it.

The Point of Smart Proxy is so that you can edit your project and preview the project smoothly. What smart proxy does it clones your video clips and renders small versions of your clip. You can then work on your project without eating up PC resources to the point hwere you cant preview smoothly and edit your project or worse crash your project. Once you render, the smart proxy edits the original video footage exactly as you did with the proxy files.
Think of this way your are an architect building a scale model of your building once your model it set the smart proxy will build the "full scale" version. Again the point is not to tax the pc resources and allow you to edit. I use this all the time on HD footage and works beautifully.
Sam

I am planning to buy a Canon HF100 to use with VS 11.5 Plus, but I'm worried about how my compute will handle AVCHD. I have an AMD dual core 5400+. Will I be okay editing if I use smart proxy? I don't care if rendering times take a while, as I'll just leave it on overnight. But I want the editing to be smooth. I mainly d0 cuts and fades and add titles, no fancy effects. I usually start with 30 minutes of footage cut down to 5-10 minutes. I will probably burn to a standard DVD that can be used in my Xbox HD-DVD player.
Anyone have any estimates of whether or not I would be in the clear with this setup? Thanks!

I think (this is from reading Ken's posts), that your PC will struggle with this, even using Proxy files. AVCHD seems to be such an extremely difficult format for PCs less than a Quad-Core to edit smoothly. You're PC may be able to do it, however it will be real, real, slow on creating the proxy files...

Thanks, vidoman. But, after creating the proxy files, should my computer be okay editing?

I would be fine if it takes 10 hours to create proxy files (leave it on overnight) and 10 hours to render the final product (leave it on overnight), as long as the editing in between does not lag.

Any thoughts?

Editing should be very smooth using the smart proxy feature, one of the best such features out there. Plus, you can choose the compression method of the smart proxy file.

If (for example) you have a slow computer, you can use a faster/higher compression. If you have a faster computer, you can choose a higher quality proxy file.

The minimum requirements for a computer to work with SmartProxy as given by Corel, are a Pentium 4 3.0 GHz with hyperthreading, or the older dual core processors (that preceded the Core 2 Duo or Quad). Unfortunately, I don't know enough about AMD processors to be able to work out the equivalents.
However, while I suspect your computer should be able to manage the job using SmartProxy, we would really need someone with an equivalent AMD computer like yours to give us his or her experience.

Otherwise, I would say that you should download the trial version of VS X2 and try it out as its ability to handle AVCHD is improved over that of VS11.5+, and much faster. I haven't yet tried it with SmartRender, but I believe it is supposed to be faster in that Department too -- at least from the advertising blurbs...

I have one of those Quad processors and Proxy works perfectly with AVCHD files from a Sony Cam, even with Dolby Digital enabled. I had purchased Sony Vegas and it could not handle AVCHD at all in my system. It crashed every time I tried to create a video file. Painful, that was money down the river...

However and once again, Proxy works seemless on my Video Studio 12 Trial. Are you sure that your proxy files are completely created? They take a long time to create, I have left my computer turned on overnight a couple of times and it is a time consuming process, but once the Proxy files are created it works smoothly. I would recommend you use a harddrive just for media files, and make sure it is formatted to NTFS and NOT "FAT" FAT formatted drives run out of memory very quickly when handling HD files. You can do a search on Microsoft's website to see how to format to NTFS. Just my 2 cents...

Thanks, guys. I will try VSX2 trial and see if it works. Does anyone know where I can get some raw Canon AVCHD files?