serious bugs in rendering in HD/H264 with X3 ?

[bnigrell]

Dear all

I am using X3 Pro for editing a HD movie.
My project is a 25 minutes footage in PAL HD :
Video H264
Upper frame first
24 bits / 1920 x 1080 / 16:9 / 25 Fps
Max rate 22699 Kbps
Audio Dolby 48000 Hz / Max rate 256 Kbs.

I am rendering the project with the as first clip option set.

I am now facing a number of serious issues with the results :

1. the rendered clip shows images with a small slippage in time.
I have illustrated this by putting the rendered clip in the 2nd video track in order to compare. At the begining of the projet, the images are the same. After some time, there is one frame slippage. At the end of my project there is a slippage as big as 10 seconds.

2. X3 is inserting images from another clip in middle of a clip
Lets suppose I call my clips A,B,C etc.
and the corresponding frames aaaa, bbbb, cccc etc.
In the middle of my project the rendered clip appears to show nnnnnffffffnnnnn !!! The ffffff frames have been inserted in replacement of the correct nnnn frames that should be there.
(I suspect this insertion and the problem n°1 are linked)

3.some images are damaged
What I mean here is that there are changes in the rendered frame. It has some similarities with what it should (original frame from the projet), but there are artefacts,coor distortions etc ... making the image ugly.

4. sound is misplaced
As I have an elephant in my movie, I have inserted the sound of a trumpeting elephant. In the project, this sound is perfectly synchronized with my elephant frame.
But in the rendered clip the sound have move 30 seconds later (when the frame is a castle).

I have double checked all this, by doing again the full rendering of the project and ensure I was not mistaken. And I am not. The new rendering shows the same defects.

(I have worked hours on editing and now feel very disapointed with this poor result )

Any help to solve those issues would be really appreaciated.

[bnigrell]

It is even more serious than anticipated
and probably a bug in the rendering mecanism

The reason I am saying that, is that I initially thought that it was due to the complexity of my project (length, 2 videotracks, several audio tracks, transitions etc ...)
But in my search for diagnosing, I have now reproduced the problem n°2 (insertion of frame from another clip) with a very simple project.

This project has only one HD clip and a duration of 3 seconds only. And when I render this single clip projet (with parameters "same as first clip") , the result is different from the initial clip. Some frames have strangly been moved from one place to another. (although total number of frames is the same in original clip and rendered clip).

[Ken Berry]

If you are using SmartRender in X3, then switch it off and try it again...

[bnigrell]

Thanks for your reply Ken.
I am not using smartrender ... and all the strange things are there.

[bnigrell]

More info on this topic.

1. I am now convinced that the H264 rendering engine has bugs in it. The reason I am saying that, is that I have rendered the same project mentionned above once with a HD result, and I have all the problems I listed in the initial post. And the second time I rendered in DV format, and all is rendered perfectly[/list]

2. I have also noticed that the rendered in HD clip as more frames than the project, whereas the DV rendered clip has just the same duration as my project

3. I have submitted a case to Corel support. There answer is that this is too serious to be dealt by on line support, and that I must go for a payable support plan

[Trevor Andrew]

Hi

Can you give a little more info regarding your video files.

1 / what camera are you using?
2 / how did you transfer the video to your pc?
3 / what type of files are they, mpeg, mts, m2ts, mov?
4 / have you use a third party program to re-code the original files before using video studio?

[bnigrell]

Many thanks Trevor to have taken the time to look into my post.

Here are the answers to your questions :
1. My camera is Canon HF20.
2. The transfer was made by direct file copy of the files in the camera to my PC hard disk. (using Windows standard file copy)
3. My clip extensions is .mts
4. No use of any 3rd party program.

This beeing said, I do not think there is any problem with my source, as the project is perfectly rendered in DV format.
If I recap the issues when rendering in HD, I get added frames in the middle, where they should not be, and the total length of the clip is longer than my project. Really looks to me that VS X3 is making wrong calculation in its internal rendering engine algorithms.