X4 Performance...SD upscale to AVCHD

[wstagner]

90 mins to render 6 mp4 files to an AVCHD file. I don't see much quality difference for the 3x longer rendering time and file size compared to an mpg file.

[Ken Berry]

Well, for once I sort of agree. I have no idea which videos you used in your experiment with 6 clips, much less how long they were in total. But you say that it took 3x as long to render them to an AVCHD file as compared to an SD mpg file. So I took the 3 mp4 files you sent me and simply inserted them twice. With transitions, this totalled 3:32 mins. I rendered them to an AVCHD HD file 1920 x 1080i and it took 5:19 minutes. So under 2x realtime. I also rendered it to an NTSC DVD-compatible mpeg-2 using 8000 kbps bitrate. That took 1:20 minutes. So in fact in my case the conversion to AVCHD took longer than it did for you -- i.e. around 4x.

I would have to agree, though, that the end quality of the two final videos was not particularly better, though I thought the AVCHD had slightly better contrast and less flicker. Mind you, this did not particularly surprise me either since we were going from mp4 SD using H.264 Baseline to AVCHD using the H.264 codec, albeit with a much larger frame size...

[wstagner]

Ken, I used those same 3 files that you used plus 3 others from the same set so your test was right on the money.

Nothing I've been able to do in X4 takes less time than previous versions.

CyberDirector 9 touts being 64 bit, using multicore CPU features, etc but the TBYB version was so crippled I wasn't able to test anything other than installation/uninstallation.

[Ken Berry]

My conversion to AVCHD definitely took less time than in previous versions, where it could be around 4x on this same computer. And the conversion to SD mpeg-2 -- less than half real time -- was also roughly half what it took with previous versions (just a tad less than real time). I have noticed also the conversion speed increases in the burning module in your other major thread about burning a DVD. So for me, at least, that is a mjor improvement in X4...