Sony Vegas 11 won't render AVCHD

[clintflickers]

Hello. I'm more than prepared to be called an idiot here. I'm trying to render a very basic 20 minute highlight package of a soccer match in Sony Vegas 11. The footage is pal AVCHD. I'm using an old PC, 4gb of RAM, 4540 GPU, windows 7, but the CPU is a Pentium D 2.8 in a 7 year old Dell.

Probably the idiot bit is thinking this was even possible, but a lot of searching hasn't given me much of a clue of whether it was, or not.

In the past, I've been able to use this PC to edit and render HD Panasonic footage, the XDCAM stuff, with very long render times. But with this AVCHD project, the render time is way too quick, and the output is nonsense, no matter how much I adjust the settings. Frustrating when preview and editing has actually been surprisingly smooth. It won't even render to an SD output. Is there anything I can try apart from either starting again on a faster PC (problematic) or start again with the original files converted to SD?

Hopefully the idiot bit is adjusting an obvious setting I've missed...very grateful for any suggestions!

[aedipuss]

which avchd? sony or mainconcept? which template and what custom settings? most importantly did you set it to render using only the cpu?

[clintflickers]

thanks for that

It's Sony AVCHD, I've chopped and changed templates and custom setting many times. Mainly I've tried the HDV 1080-50i template and primarily been trying to export as WMV or Sony AVC MP4 for youtube or vimeo. I've kept the frame rate at 25 the whole time, but experimented heavily with field order, pixel aspect ratio and pixel rate. Most attempts at AVC MP4 rendering have been CPU only (rather than automatic in the custom settings / video tab in the render templates dialogue box, is that the only setting you can change?).

the results are uniformly heavily pixellated, with just a few frames a second, often entirely missing audio

[aedipuss]

vegas switched back to mainconcept for the primary avchd encoder for pro 11. try the mc internet 1080 template. start without any changes. pixel aspect ratio for avchd is pretty much always 1:1 square and most often progressive. deviate too much and no player will like it.

[TreeTops]

"most often progressive" but not always. AVCHD from my sony camera is interlaced. (1080i)

[clintflickers]

Thanks again. I'm playing catchup here, but maybe that is the problem? The footage is from the Sony HDR-SR1, which was 1080i, a very early Sony AVCHD camcorder and it apparently didn't have square pixels, they're 1.33 at 1440 x 1080.

Trying the mc internet 1080 render template had the same results, unfortuntely

[aedipuss]

the HDV template should work fine for that cam. check with mediainfo to see if the sony cam is producing tff or bff interlacing. you should still output 1:1 square pixel format avchd as 1920x1080 or 1280x720.

you might try uninstalling vegas, downloading the latest updated version from sony and re-installing. can't say i've ever run into a problem like yours and i've been using vegas since version 6.

if you have a small test video from the cam upload it here and i'll run it through vegas to see if it works here. something around 30mb should post ok. if not a file hosting site is fine.

[clintflickers]

Thanks again. It's tff. Already reinstalled, but with an old version, I'll give the new one a go and I've uploaded a 2 second test file.

[clintflickers]

try that one

[clintflickers]

reinstalling with the updated version of vegas has improved things a lot but I'm still getting a lot of pixellation and wavy lines - what's the best deinterlace method, field order and pixel aspect ratio for the project settings, any idea?

[aedipuss]

here's what vegas produced here using the standard mc avc internet 1080 template @ 4mbps
interlacing is set to interpolate fields and quality to best.

[_Al_]

Do not deinterlace to 25p. Only for Youtube and such.