VS pro X2: AVCHD/MPEG render speed?

[cgould]

I happily downloaded the trial of X2, to check out the new features, especially the vaunted quad-core support for rendering, and other speed improvements.

I have a Q6600 quadcore @2.4GHz, running at 1066FSB & 2GHZ DDR2 RAM at same speed, on WinXP MCE... not the top-line quadcore, but pretty good.

I wanted to post some of my speed comparison tests, and ask others what they have seen; since while some things are faster, the rendering appears NOT what Corel advertised.


I have noticed that many operations do seem significantly faster than 11.5+, especially selecting clips in the timeline, the Share-Create video dialog, and loading in many HDV transport stream clip files into the library (2:28 for X2 for 64files, vs 3:31 for 11.5+, but this is still annoyingly slow..)

I made a sample HD project w/ 5minutes of HDV files in timeline, and rendered test AVCHD video file w/ matching res, 1440x1080, default 15Mbps, trying both 70% and 100% quality...
It took ~18minutes to render the 5minute AVC video; CPU usage was around 65%, evenly spread on 4 cores. This is >3.5X slower than realtime.

The announcement/advertisement said that rendering a 30minute AVCHD video, took 32mins in X2, vs 2:27hrs in 11.5+? That doesn't seem to match...
maybe they were talking about "smart-rendering" an existing AVCHD timeline/video file, or?

Also: I tested the same project/render on 11.5+, and it took the same time!! (and this is vaguely close to what I recall as well..)
Is this because the X2 install updated the shared MPEG.Now render engine, or is my X2 slow, or what?

I tried simply rendering an HDV program-stream file (eg just re-wrapping the MPG to PS, not TS), and that was a bit faster than real-time, 4:41, CPU usage ~35% on all 4 cores. Seems very slow just for a re-wrapping of MPG2 TS->PS?!! (Again, this was identical on VS11.5+?)

I also tried rendering a DVD MPG2, 5.5Mbps 100% quality, and HDV-DVD took 8:56min, ~35% cpu/4cores; 1.8x slower than realtime. This seems a bit slow?
I tested in VS11.5+, and X2 is faster for HDV-DVD: 11.5+ took 11:52, ~30% cpu less evenly across 4 cores, eg 2.4x slower than realtime.

Edit: In comparison, VS X2 Pro rendered a 4:3 DV timeline 5min project, to the same DVD MPG2 5.5MBps in under 2minutes, w/ ~75% cpu even across 4 cores.
So DV->DVD is over 2.5x FASTER than realtime, so that's very good; but I don't have much SD content any more...
VS11.5+ rendered the same in 2:30, w/ 55% cpu (saturating only 2 cores), so VS X2 clearly showed some improvement for SD MPG, 25% faster than VS11.5 (on quadcore).

What do others see, and is this as fast as expected, or?


Edit

[etech6355]

Have you done any quality comparisons?

So far my HDV -> SD conversions are coming out very nice looking.

Batch convert feature works great.

Maybe to soon to tell, almost any program I've used to convert HDV -> AVC takes about 3X+ longer depending on your compression settings, but even at that I'm concerned with the final output being of nice quality.

So far, my experience, the quality from X2 is very good.