SmartRender and compliance

[rrmunn]

I am looking for suggestions on producing Blu-Ray compliant output from VideoStudio. I have VS PRO X4 with SP2. The input is AVCHD from a Canon HF200 and the target is Adobe Encore.

The reason for Encore is that I need a good navigation solution. VS’s menu and navigation is somewhat primitive. But Encore is notoriously zealous about compliance. An had given up on getting Encore to recognise anything from VS as compliant but took another look and now I’m even more confused.

As a baseline, if you take the raw clips from the camera and put them into Encore it accepts that they are Blu-Ray (H.264/AC3) compliant and will not attempt to transcode them. This is what I want since the output will be essentially the same as the input so no loss and the time to output is quite fast. The exception to this is when something like a transition occurs then it must be rendered. What I was not expecting is that VS does not appear to render the whole clip. It renders the bit that has the transition or effect or title etc. up to the next GOP then appears to revert back to not transcoding again. I can’t be 100% sure of that but carefully watching the CPU and disk activity and showing the render progress it is quite obvious that when it gets to raw footage again it starts behaving like a file copy rather than a render. This suggests that SmartRender actually does try and do the right things.

I did try to put a clip at the front of the project then tell VS to render as per first clip. This did not work, the output was compliant but it decided to render everything. I would expect this to be the ideal case for NOT rendering but something went wrong. If you put an item that does need rendering followed by the raw clips it renders than flips into just copy. There seems to be a logic fault here somewhere. Then I found that if disabled SmartRender the output for was compliant but it rendered all the clips.

If I output the project as Blu-Ray (MPEG-2) it come out as fully compliant and Encore won’t touch it. Of course it is twice as big as the original and some degree of rendering must have taken place, although it takes only a fraction of the time for other renders. I am not sure why this is the case either. If I use the other options (like 1440x1080i) it is also compliant (although the scenes are totally distorted as you expect).

I also tried a custom preset setting the video to 1920x1080i with a max bit rate of 20000 H.264 and the AC3 to 384kbps. I know there are quite a few more factors in Blu-Ray compliant video but this is all I can set.

It seems no matter what I do I get compliant Blu-Ray output EXCEPT for the one I really want with SmartRender doing it’s thing.

All I can conclude from this is that VS can produce compliant Blu-Ray and SmartRender short circuits the render but for some reason already fully compliant video gets turned into non-compliant video. So close yet so far. I have got to be missing something here but I just cannot see what it is.

Can anyone make a suggestion?

[Ken Berry]

I have been saying for a couple of years now -- but largely shouting in the wilderness! -- that people should NOT use SmartRender with high def video, whether it is AVCHD or HDV. If you have the patience, and use the same high quality settings as the original, the amount of quality lost in the full render will simply not be detectable by the naked eye. So if Encore will recognise a fully rendered piece of video, then I suggest you use that workflow.

[rrmunn]

Yes I understand your comments but for a 25 hour video stream the render time is enormous vs a couple of hours if it does not.
Besides, and this is all I wanted to know, VS should not touch the H.264 header which is why Encore thinks it is not compliant. I would understand if VS produced no compliant outputs (there are lots of NLE's like this) but it obviously does and this is the case where it really should NOT have a problem being compliant.