AVCHD to WMV is slloooooow

[mcleaver]

I am trying to recode 35 minutes of Full-HD .mts (Panasonic AVCHD - 3.3 GB) as WMV and it takes about 12 hours. Surely this is a little over the top?
I note that .wmv is the only video I can work with on my Intel Core 2 machine with 4 GB of memory. Anything else just judders and jars.
I am using a bitrate of 8000 instead of the default of 1000 (of course). However I'll have to leave my machine on for several weeks if I want to transcode everything. Is there a better way?
Martin

[Soopafresh]

Which app are you using to convert to WMV ?

[mcleaver]

Sorry: TMpgEnc.
Martin

[guns1inger]

If you cannot play back full HD on your system then you are either using the wrong software, or have other problems.

[mcleaver]

I can play full HD using e.g. Media Player Classic and the CoreAVC codec through Haali. But all video editors cannot cope - be it Vegas, Pinnacle STudio... ALl that works with no hassles at full HD is Windows MOvie Maker with WMV files.
But the problem now is how to speed up the transcoding.
Martin

[Soopafresh]

Resize the video to a smaller output dimension in Tmpgenc - try 960x540 or 848x480. I can convert to lossless AVI at 20fps when I resize to 848x480

[mcleaver]

Resize the video to a smaller output dimension in Tmpgenc - try 960x540 or 848x480

Interesting contribution... if I wanted to resize, why would I use HD in the first place?
Martin

[Soopafresh]

Because the visual quality is MUCH better than filming at SD resolution - even when you resize to SD dimensions.

[guns1inger]

If you wanted HD, you should have bought an HDV camera instead. AVCHD is still ironing out the kinks. Every camera does it differently, so no program handles all footage the same, and hence there are few good conversions tools.

You wanted a solution to the time taken - Soopafresh suggested reducing the size because this will reduce the time requirements. It may be that you have to face 12 hour encodes until the whole AVCHD debacle is sorted out.

HDV, on the other hand, is a doddle in comparison.

[Soopafresh]

VoltaicHD might be faster for conversion. Not free, but maybe worth the Euros

[mcleaver]

INdeed... looks that way. I had to buy it, because a test on a file less than 50 MB would be silly. Voltaic takes about 12 x the video length, while TMPgEnc takes about 20 times as long. Not quite sure however how it will cope with interlacing.
Martin