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Hi!
I have some AVCHD 1080i clips that i want to put on DVD. This is in quite straightforward, but as I dont need all the picture, I have tried to crop the video while downconverting to DVD PAL. I use around 80% of original picture.

I have found two basic ways of cropping (by searching this great forum!):

1: Use video filter pan/zoom (or the crop filter, works samr way)
2: Put video in overlay track and adjust

Surprisingly the method 2 is far superior when it comes to the resulting video, its a lot sharper in the details.

Recorded video Canon HF100 AVCHD 1080i 25fps. UFF 16.000kb/s

Output video DVD PAL highest quality, UFF 8000kb/s vbr.

I have done a lot of experiments as I would prefer the method 1 to work, dfferent project settings, disabling all sorts of proxy and smartrender etc.

Method 2 continues to be the only usefull way of cropping, without seriuos detoriation of the picture.


Hope someone has a way of improving the result when using filters!

I tried with VS 11.5 - and find that your overlay technique gave better picture quality than using the zoom filter.

Only problem is there's no way of setting the overlay to a specific size in VS 11.5, other than the default size or 100%. Is that any different in X2?

2Dogs wrote:I tried with VS 11.5 - and find that your overlay technique gave better picture quality than using the zoom filter.

Only problem is there's no way of setting the overlay to a specific size in VS 11.5, other than the default size or 100%. Is that any different in X2?

Thanks for testing. Yeah, you can set the overlay to whatever you like, i.e. stretch the picture beyond the frame, thus "zooming in".

I have a suspicon why the filter makes the video worse, probably first the system downconverts the video to 720x576, or whatever the project properties are set to, then add the crop/zoom. It should do it in reverse order!

Your overlay method led me to discover another strange thing.

I made up a short test project using some AVCHD HD clips from three flash memory camcorders.

On my laptop, a 1.83Ghz C2D with 2Gb of RAM, running XP Pro SP2, I am unable to play the project, even with smart proxy enabled, and VS 11.5

Clicking on the timeline, however, I can scrub thru it with no problems.

Putting the clips on the overlay track instead, I can play the project with no stuttering.

The output from the two versions of the project - one with clips in the main video track, the other with them on the overlay track - seems to be identical, with similar rendering times.

Curious - and annoying! Anyone get the same effect with X2?

I just tried your experiment with X2. Disappointingly, neither method resulted in AVCHD which would play smoothly in VS on my Quad -- in either Clip or Project mode. (The original clips would not either... I do not use SmartProxy.) Both played perfectly in PowerDVD 8, however.

One potentially positive result nevertheless was that the new clip (made with3 clips and two crossfades in the overlay track) played back *without* the annoying blip which seems to follow transitions when using AVCHD in the main timeline... I may need to do more experimentation to establish this as repeatable with other transitions, though... Hmmm!

Interesting!

I'd say we're some way off devising the "suggested workflow" for AVCHD!