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I have been using (or trying to use) Corel VideoStudio Pro X2 to edit my 1920x1080 AVCHD clips recorded with a Canon HF-100. My PC has an Intel Q6600 overclocked to 3.4 GHz and an nVidia 8800GT video card. Here are some of my observations when using Corel and a couple other pieces of software:

Corel VS Pro X2
¡E Playing AVCHD clip: > 50% CPU usage! This seems way too high.
¡E AVCHD editing is extremely unresponsive and choppy! It's almost intolerable when working with multiple AVCHD clips. With SmartProxy enabled, performance improves, but with multiple clips it doesn¡¦t work right (or it¡¦s just taking an insanely long time to create the temp files). If I start previewing the project somewhere in the middle, I get about 1 frame every 5 seconds. This is unacceptable.
¡E Rendered clips look okay though if you can manage to get through the editing stage. I¡¦m rendering to 720p WMV (for YouTube).


Pixela ImageMixer (software that came with the Canon HF-100)
¡E Playing AVCHD clip: ~30% CPU usage! Much lower than Corel.
¡E AVCHD editing works much more smoothly than in Corel. Using same clips and same edit operations as Corel, project preview playback was still acceptable.
¡E Obviously there are not as many editing options, and I haven¡¦t compared the quality of rendered video to that of Corel.


Interesting notes about a player:

Cyberlink PowerDVD 9
¡E Playing AVCHD clip without hardware acceleration: ~25% CPU usage. MUCH more efficient than Corel VS X2. Why would this be? It seems Corel's support for AVCHD is just not up to par.
¡E With hardware acceleration enabled (NVIDIA PureVideo), CPU usage goes to ~1%. There is also an astonishing difference in playback quality compared to software (CPU) decoding! The difference is night and day¡Xespecially for clips with a lot of motion.


This brings up a question: Why aren't there any AVCHD editing programs out there that are taking advantage of hardware acceleration so we can get smooth previews during editing and extremely fast renders?

Alas, I am STILL looking for a program that can edit AVCHD with acceptable performance.

PS: I have installed the update pack that supposedly improved AVCHD editing. My version of VS Pro X2 is: 12.0.98.1

This brings up a question: Why aren't there any AVCHD editing programs out there that are taking advantage of hardware acceleration so we can get smooth previews during editing and extremely fast renders?

There is, however just how much are you willing to spend? Try FCS, only $1,299. But if you don't have a MAC computer you'll need one of them too. You can pick up a Quad-core Xenon starting at about $2,500, or an 8-core starting at about $3,299. So for abut $3,800 to $4,600 you should be able to edit AVCHD smoothly, and render somewhat fast.

However to expect a <$100 program like VS to be able to do what a high-end pro program can do is a little unreasonable. When VS was first developed, DV (avi) was considered the best format for consumers to edit on consumer grade PCs. The camcorders back then were not the High-def ones, and the high-end camcorders were the 3ccd models, that would cost you a few thousand to own. PCs that could handle video editing would still cost you a couple of thousand.

Fast-forward and you can pick up an inexpensive Hi-Def camcorder for about 1-thousand, and a PC for less then $500. The problem is that these PCs really have not kept up with the high-compression the newer Hi-Def camcorders use. Most consumers are not going to spend, or just can not afford to spend a minimum of $5,000 to get setup for editing video. Thus consumer-level editing programs are going to be geared toward their budgets. I'm sure Corel would be able to produce a product similar to FCS, however they would also have to ask a similar price.

This is just my opinion on this, if you are really serious about editing video, more than just family videos, or the occasional wedding, using a PC is not the way to go. Apple-Macs have always performed much better than PCs with graphics. If I were in business producing DVDs, especially any Hi-Def, I would be using a MAC not a PC...

Final note, a friend of mine had a special PC built so that he could edit his hi-def video. This was about 2 yrs ago. The PC is a quad-duo-core, having 4-duo core chips for a total of 8 virtual processors, that were Xenon, not the cheap ones found in Tier-1 PCs. He uses Adobe's NLEs, and reports that he has no problems. However his PC only cost him $10,000...

KillrBuckeye wrote:This brings up a question: Why aren't there any AVCHD editing programs out there that are taking advantage of hardware acceleration so we can get smooth previews during editing and extremely fast renders?

There are! If you can afford them!

And I am sure KllrBuckeye's reply would be, "then why does Corel advertise the following?"

VideoStudio Editor ¡V powerful editing & disc authoring in leading formats, including HDV™ and AVCHD™

And that's a good question.

Perhaps a good Quad-Core Xenon with nothing but VS, and whatever capture program, would allow VS to smoothly edit AVCHD. However I'd have to agree that Corel, like several others, just have not been able to write programs to really handle multi-core processors effectively. Again VS is not a Pro-level application. The old saying goes..You get what you pay for...

vidoman wrote:There is, however just how much are you willing to spend? Try FCS, only $1,299. But if you don't have a MAC computer you'll need one of them too. You can pick up a Quad-core Xenon starting at about $2,500, or an 8-core starting at about $3,299. So for abut $3,800 to $4,600 you should be able to edit AVCHD smoothly, and render somewhat fast.

...

However to expect a <$100 program like VS to be able to do what a high-end pro program can do is a little unreasonable.

I know quite a bit about PC hardware, so I can tell you that my 3.4 GHz Q6600 CPU is equivalent to a quad-core Xeon running at the same speed. (The 65nm Xeons are pretty much the same as the Core2-labeled parts, with a few extra capabilities, such as ability to run multiple CPUs in the same board). The only significant upgrade I could make (aside from getting the new Intel Core i7) is to get a multi-CPU machine. Maybe this is something I will consider if consumer-grade video editing software doesn't start to handle AVCHD more efficiently.

Still, hardware doesn't explain why the very simple Pixela Imagemixer software that came with my camera does a much better job handling AVCHD editing then Corel VS Pro X2. Why does Corel use 50% of my CPU power just to play back an AVCHD file while other software uses half of that? It reveals that Corel does a relatively poor job of handling AVCHD, despite advertising "powerful" support for the format. I'm not expecting performance equal to $2000 editing software, but it should at least be usable, right?

We could discuss this until the cows come home but it would be a fruitless exercise. No one here works for Corel - we are all users of their software like yourself. We are unpaid volunteers who try and help others who are having problems working out how to use the software.

Any constructive criticisms are better directed directly at Corel themselves - their staff do not read these pages - only us weary worn out customers trying to help out.

sjj1805 wrote:We could discuss this until the cows come home but it would be a fruitless exercise. No one here works for Corel - we are all users of their software like yourself. We are unpaid volunteers who try and help others who are having problems working out how to use the software.

Any constructive criticisms are better directed directly at Corel themselves - their staff do not read these pages - only us weary worn out customers trying to help out.

The reason for my post was to see if other people were having similar experiences or had any suggestions. Maybe there's something I can do within the program to improve performance?

Hopefully Corel is already aware of the poor AVCHD editing performance and are working on a fix.

The 'problem' with your post is that it is, sadly, far from new. This is definitely not a criticism of you. Quite the contrary. If you do a search using 'AVCHD' as your search parameter, you will get almost literally a million posts complaining about VS 11+, 11.5+ and now 12 and its inability to deal with AVCHD properly. The inability to play it smoothly in project mode during editing is just one of the complaints which has been re-hashed here for more than a year or 18 months. So you are definitely not alone. I too have a Q6600 and have the same problems. I, however, am in the luckier category of not having an AVCHD video camera of my own, but a HDV one which simply does not have these problems. I only get them when, in the course of trying to help out here, I try to edit AVCHD which I have either created, downloaded or people have sent me on disc for experiment. I have, however, on a number of occasions, produced successful AVCHD hybrid discs (from my HDV) with none of the problems encountered by others in simple edits and playback of original AVCHD.

The bottom line seems to be that, despite its advertising, VS is NOT capable of editing AVCHD smoothly, and I am tempted to say "regardless of the power of your computer", though to date, I can only say what I have found myself with my Q6600 and and Core2Duo 2.4 GHz. Both can play native AVCHD smoothly, but when editing, previews in Project mode are jerky. I have learned to ignore that since, generally, once rendered, it plays smoothly. (This is without raising another verifiable bug of a blip which appears when you insert a transition as part of the editing of AVCHD...)

VS now has SmartProxy which does allow smooth editing, as you have found, but the downside is that it does indeed (as you correctly surmise) take an extremely long time to generate the proxy files, so that for a lengthy project you are probably better leaving the program running and processing overnight. And I am not joking when I say that...

The other problem is that Video Studio is not alone in this -- other editing programs, including higher end ones such as Adobe Premiere and Vegas -- also have some difficulty -- though people using the Cinema Craft Cineform encoder with those programs, and potentially also with VS, seem to be far more successful. I understand that that encoder is included as part of Vegas and also its downmarket younger brother, Vegas Movie Studio, though I am not 100% certain of this. See this thread as only one example: http://forum.corel.com/EN/viewtopic.php?p=152607#152607 The downside is the added cost of the encoder, which is not cheap as far as I am aware.

The fault in all this needs to be shared, though. Yes, I think that it is unethical for software companies to advertise that they will edit AVCHD when they plainly can't do a good job in it using all the bells and whistles that the software otherwise provides. But to me, a lot of the blame must also be laid at the feet of the camera manufacturers who do not seem to have agreed on exactly what specifications and encoders they will use for their own range of AVCHD cameras. So far, the major manufacturers each seem to use their own standards, and to complicate matters still further, the international standards organisation last year changed the international AVCHD standard to a maximum bitrate of 24 Mbps from the earlier maximum of 18 Mbps. So far Canon is the only company of which I am aware which has brought out cameras matching this, and making the job of VS even more impossible but more are sure to follow, if they haven't already!

And yes, I agree that it is unconscionable that the simple software provided with the cameras seems to be able to edit AVCHD smoothly. But that software is made or tweaked by the camera companies themselves to work specifically with their products. And naturally they are unwilling to share their proprietary secrets with the software makers. So the whole situation is a mess.

Now this is very cold comfort all round, I realise. But as has already been noted, none of us here work for Corel, let alone any of the camera companies, so there is little that any of us can do except bring our complaints in massive numbers to the makers. Corel, like all the other software manufacturers, is well aware of the problem. But they have been since VS11+ came out. They work on it, and bring out patches and new versions, each of which brings some improvement to the situation, but never enough.

I can only repeat that I am awfully glad that I opted for HDV...

Good post Ken.

It is true for pretty much all programs.... the best way to edit avchd is not edit it at all but rather convert it to something else first.

I use the Cineform Neo Scene which converts avchd to a lossless avi which won't work in VS.... but then I'm not using VS either.

However there are a few converters that may work with VS... GEAR SHIFT and UPSHIFT

http://www.vasst.com/index.php?option=c ... &Itemid=57

http://www.softpedia.com/get/Multimedia ... hift.shtml

So far, the major manufacturers each seem to use their own standards, and to complicate matters still further, the international standards organisation last year changed the international AVCHD standard to a maximum bitrate of 24 Mbps from the earlier maximum of 18 Mbps. So far Canon is the only company of which I am aware which has brought out cameras matching this, and making the job of VS even more impossible but more are sure to follow, if they haven't already!

This however is not quite true.
There are 2 types of avchd being used right now....

Main profile avchd used by Sony that has a max bit rate of 17Mb/s.
High profile avchd used by Canon/Panasonic and it has a max bit rate of 24Mb/s
The main profile has a lower bitrate but is easier than the high profile to playback and edit.

The term "AVCHD" not only refers to the codec/format used (avc/h.264) but also to the file structure that resides in your camcorder... which confuses things even more because the file structures are different on the Canon, Sony, and Panasonic cameras. In fact if you drag your M2TS file off the camera onto your hard drive then it can no longer TRULY be recognized as "AVCHD" because it's out of its file structure... it's now just a AVC file with muxed audio.

I am by no means an expert on AVCHD cameras. However, certainly one of the things that became clear in this forum is that Panasonic, for one, seems to be using its own proprietary AVCHD codec which gave particular problems to owners of the Panny SD-9 video camera. I am also pretty sure that one used a max bitrate of 18 Mbps. A user sent me a whole DVD of SD-9 footage and it certain had a max. bitrate of near 18 Mbps -- though I concede that Panasonic may now have moved to the new high profile standard of 24 Mbps.

Thanks also for those links which I am sure would be of considerable interest to at least some of our AVCHD users. I note that both cost the same (US$49.99) and that Gear Shift seems to be a proxy program primarily aimed at the HDV market though it can also apparently convert AVCHD .mts or .m2ts to YUV 4:2:2 file proxies. But unless I am reading thing incorrectly, it seems that it can only apply those edits and output in .m2t (i.e. HDV) and not AVCHD format. Upshift would appear to be a straight AVCHD to HDV converter.

I guess the question would then be what the end quality would be like if, say, the user of either program wanted to output to an AVCHD hybrid disc which would thus see a conversion from AVCHD to HDV then back to AVCHD once again. I guess if you maintained the highest quality settings, any loss in quality would probably be minimal.

Otherwise, if a user was intending to burn a Blu-Ray disc, it would not make much difference whether you use HDV or AVCHD video. Nor would there be any problem if, like me, I watch my high definition stuff on my HDTV streamed directly from my computer via my Sony PS3 which happily recognises and plays HDV and AVCHD (and indeed just about anything else) with no problem.

Dear Ken

VS X2 has a batch convert function that will convert AVCHD to HDV. Any reason not to use that rather than pay for Upshift?

Regards

Paul

Ken,

Thank you so much for your thorough response. I suppose I'll have to make due with the poor AVCHD editing capability that is available right now, or convert to some other format before editing like you suggest.

VS X2 has a batch convert function that will convert AVCHD to HDV. Any reason not to use that rather than pay for Upshift?

In fact, I was not aware of that! Nice to know... I guess Gear Shift and Upshift should therefore be described as programs for people who don't have VS! Depending on Gear Shift's speed of conversion to the proxy files, it could also be useful for people who are impatient and unwilling to wait for the admittedly very lengthy time VS takes to produce its own proxy SD mpeg-2 files...

But as to the specifics of your question, Paul, I cannot see any reason why the batch convert to HDV should not work -- it should, after all, be using the same high def properties of HDV of 1440 x 1080 and a bitrate of 25 Mbps... so quality should definitely be maintained. Even if there is some loss of quality (which there probably would be given the essentially lossy quality of all mpeg formats), the high def quality of both AVCHD and HDV would mean that the loss would probably be totally unnoticeable by the human eye!