Lossless video quality from VS X4

[sharanmini]

Hello There,
I have Canon HF S200 and VS X4.

Capture video from my camera as AVCHD MTS (24p) format, edit it on X4 and share it as AVCHD video file to my hard drive.

What is the best way to get lossless or 100% quality video from this editor?

Thanks in Advance.

[Ken Berry]

First, it is impossible to get lossless AVCHD which has undergone a conversion. That is simply the nature of the beast. AVCHD is mpeg-4 and all mpeg formats are lossy. Some quality is lost with each conversion.

But of course it is high quality video, and so if you convert using identical settings, then you should get virtually identical quality simply because any degradation in that one conversion will simply not be detectable by the naked eye.

Some people will no doubt recommend using SmartRender which means you would only render those parts of the video which have had some editing applied to them, leaving the rest in its original format. That is true, but a lot of people in successive versions of VS from about 11.5+ onwards, have had a lot of trouble when they apply SmartRender to AVCHD. That has led me over the past two or three years against using SmartRender with high def video.

You can also improve quality by using two pass render to optimise quality. Some people would also suggest pushing the quality/speed slider up from its default 70% to 100% or a little less. However, to me, that has never produced any discernible improvement in quality, but has increased the rendering time significantly...

[immerjan]

Reading the post I found that there is something in the problem that I seek the answer to too: How do I get the 24p onto any HD format? I looked through the various possible formats, but it seems that I can only create clips in 24p when I use up to standard definition resolution. And is there a difference between the Bluray specification of 24p and my camera's (Sony CX560) "23.9x"p?