Why no AVCHD editing without re-encoding?

[digitalfreaknyc]

Hello all..

This may be a bit of a newbie question but is there a reason why a program hasn't come out that will allow you to edit your AVCHD files without re-enoding them?

Is there anything even on the horizon?

Thanks...

[johns0]

If you searched here first you would find a few apps such as tssniper,tsmuxer,MKVtoolnix and multiavchd.

[digitalfreaknyc]

I actually did several searches and turned up nothing. Even a search of the tools section turned up nothing. MKV says nothing about AVC discs. The others say nothing about being lossless either. So thank you for your passive aggressive attempt at helping me.

Is anyone else out there a little more generous?

[poisondeathray]

There is no frame accurate AVCHD editor yet , because this requires re-encoding of the GOP. The current "cutters" can only cut on I-frames. But there is no re-encoding with tsmuxer, tsdoctor, h264 ts cutter, ts sniper, tspe, etc...

It was the same situation with MPEG2 a few years ago, so you just have to give it some time for development

VideoRedo has an h.264 version in the works

[digitalfreaknyc]

Thanks poison. That's what I figured. How long did it take for MPEG2 to come out with a frame accurate editor?

Guess I'll just be saving everything for now.

Btw...saw this entry on wiki. I'm assuming it's false?

Cyberlink PowerDirector 7 is capable of editing AVCHD natively, without transcoding, intermediate codecs or proxy files. Using a patented technique (SVRT), AVCHD clips can be edited and output losslessly to AVCHD or Blu-ray disc. PowerDirector also supports GPU encoding acceleration on both ATI and NVidia graphics platforms. PowerDirector can output the finished movie to a variety of video formats, DVD, AVCHD on DVD, or Blu-ray disc.

[poisondeathray]

Well early MPEG2 development is way before I started learning about video, but you can ask some of the veterans here. I think it tool a few years at least before "videoredo" type products were available for MPEG2

I haven't used that cyberlink product, but from what I've read, as soon as you edit the clips, the whole segment is re-encoded - this makes it no different than appending clips in say, tsmuxer. This is the same behaviour as Vegas 9 which also claims being able to this type of editing, so it's not really "smart rendering" like what videoredo does now with mpeg2. BTW, nero also claims to be able to do this.

If you do try it out and find it works (properly) please tell us!

[Ventolin]

Cyberlink Powerdirector in certain circumstances and with certain streams is able to frame accurately smart edit h.264. Getting the right conditions is fairly difficult however. Their claim of "lossless" only applies to the parts that are not re-encoded - if it's sub gop then it will re-encode that part, so is not 100% lossless.

TSPE is the only sub-gop smart editor available now that works with most h.264 / AVCHD transport streams (with frame accurate in development) and is definitely 100% lossless as there is no encoder included with TSPE yet. TSPE has had this functionality publicly available for almost a year now.

VideoRedo also has h.264 ability in closed alpha testing at the moment.

For true sub-gop frame accurate editing, the GOP must be re-encoded (almost all of the time) so you will never have a true lossless edit.

Regards,

Vent