X3 AVCHD trials and Woes

[tjdmobile]

First of all, great forum.

I just picked up a new Sony HD Cam (CX110) and I am recording in AVCHD 16 megabit mode (1080i), second highest setting. I come from the Mac side (using Boot Camp Win7 now). I have used iMovie '09 forever and loved it. Unfortunately I had to start a search for new software to edit because iMovie '09 did not love the interlaced video that is native out of my new camcorder. Sure, I could still use iMovie, but the quality was very much diminished (much softer video output than input). Anyway, long story I trialed 4 other packages and decided on this one. Very happy, but it's been a rocky road. My Canon SX 20 IS movies crashed X3 on encode. I discovered that while the video portion of the file was fine, the audio portion caused X3 to puke on the encode. I now use Super and MP4 wrapper. I direct stream copy the video, and re-encode the audio to AAC-LC. No loss of quality, and is great. Hope this helps someone, and demonstrates I do try to fix problems before going online for an answer.

Now on to the Sony. I did a nice little composition with video pans, still photo animations, titles, music, the works. Came to about 3 minutes. Did the first render (smart render, AVCHD 1080). For some reason, although I have rendered a few other videos fine, this one did the stutter and crash on my PC and Blu Ray player. The stutter came in at different points every time I changed settings, but it still came in. Wanted to see if it was the source video so I made a new project, added all 45 clips and let it smart render that as a 10 minute movie. Smooth as silk.

Decided to fuss around with settings. Turned off hardware acceleration, nope. Changed to MPEG-2 Blu Ray, nope. Deleted titles, nope. Deleted photos, problem cleared. Hmm...

So I thought I was on to something. On the existing time-line, I did a "replace clip" with another photo, from a different camera. They had nothing to do with my movie, but when I rendered with Smart Render, AVCHD 1080, low and behold it plays back perfectly. So this begs the question - do some of our problems stem from Jpeg files which "throw off the renderer" or something? The stutter never happened when playing back a photo, but during the movie.

Just throwing out something to chew on. This X3 is fantastic if I can trust that hours of work putting together a clip will render reliably when it counts.

TJD

[Bruceqld]

Hi TJD.

I too came to came to X3 as an answer to editing AVCHD, particularly because of the smart rendering function. I'm also running a mac with bootcamp/xp7. Whilst working on simple projects it has been very stable and I have sung it's praises. However I recently had to port two larger, more complex projects across to Vegas Video in order to complete them losing many hours of work. It just doesn't seem to handle complex video rendering combined with any kind of audio editing.
Further frustrating this is that the errors can never be pinned down to a particular file or transition or filter. Just when you think you've found it - something else happens. Have you encountered the illegal argument error yet? It's particularly fun.
Hopefully some of these issues will be addressed in future updates, though I suspect the target market for X3 is probably the less complex video edit.

Smart render is great on those simple projects though!

Check out Sony Vegas Video 9 combined with Vaast Gearshift for proxy editing on the bootcamped mac. Works like a charm on the big jobs - and you know you'll get to the end:)

Bruce.