Adobe Premiere Elements and AVCHD slow performance

[j0nx]

I'm trying to add a title overlay to 3 minute avchd file with Elements 7.0 and export it to a smaller file. The video was taken with a panasonic sz3 camera (720p). Unfortunately, after adding the title and lowering the bit rate some, the export process takes 2 hours with a quad core processor and 8gb or ram. I am running windows 7 64bit. If I use handbrake to convert the same avchd to a lower bitrate mp4 file, it takes just a few minutes . Is Elements just a poorly written program? It says everywhere that its multithreaded but the export process is only using one core. What is a better program for doing simple video editing with a fast converter?

Thanks

[edDV]

I don't have Elements 7.0 but out of curiosity what specifically did you do in the handbrake conversion?

Normally increasing compression would slow things more or drastically lower picture quality. One would normally decompress to speed processing.

AVCHD Lite is fairly new. Does Elements claim to optimally support it?

[j0nx]

I don't have Elements 7.0 but out of curiosity what specifically did you do in the handbrake conversion?

Normally increasing compression would slow things more or drastically lower picture quality. One would normally decompress to speed processing.

AVCHD Lite is fairly new. Does Elements claim to optimally support it?

Elements 7.0 does support avchd although it doesn't mention avchd lite (which I believe the only difference is 720p vs 1080p for the avchd spec). My goal is to reduce the size of avchd videos so that I can share them easier while at the same time keeping them in a modern HD codec. Also, I'd like to add a few basic things like text and titles. I can do the downsampling/conversion very quickly with handbrake but if I want to add text, titles etc I have to use Premiere. I suppose the solution is to convert to a more Premiere friendly codec but I'm not sure the best way to accomplish this without doing multiple conversions and thereby losing quality each time. It would be nice to use a fast multithreaded 64bit application that can do it all with avchd (if it exists).

[edDV]

AVCHD is 1440x1080i or 1920x1080i.

AVC Lite is 1280x720p but frame rate is 30 or less.

You didn't say what you did in handbrake. Lowering bitrate is highly destructive.

[j0nx]

AVCHD is 1440x1080i or 1920x1080i.

AVC Lite is 1280x720p but frame rate is 30 or less.

You didn't say what you did in handbrake. Lowering bitrate is highly destructive.

AVChd lite is 60fps.

I mentioned several times what I did.

[edDV]

What codec format, frame size, and bitrate did you export from handbrake?

"AVCHD Lite" is more a marketing term than a standard at the moment and there is much confusion about frame rates. The edit packages need to be updated. They typically expect 1440x1080i or 1920x1080i for AVCHD.

Most digital cameras play loose with frame rate accuracy and not all give 29.97 or 25 frame rate settings. According to this company, AVCHD lite is not 60fps for NTSC but 30p repeated twice.
http://shedworx.com/avchd-lite-50p

[poisondeathray]

It's an issue with AVCHD Lite. Most decoders haven't been patched to deal with this format yet.

It's actually 30fps with frame repeats in the stream (fake 60fps), and this fools many decoders, which often give wrong frame count or fps

Several threads have addressed this issue at videohelp if you search. To summarize, one option is to use avisynth and ffmpegsource2, vegas handles it properly with "disable resample", Adobe internal decoder doesn't handle it very well, unless you use avisynth to frameserve in (I don't have elements, but use PP CS4)

[j0nx]

It's an issue with AVCHD Lite. Most decoders haven't been patched to deal with this format yet.

It's actually 30fps with frame repeats in the stream (fake 60fps), and this fools many decoders, which often give wrong frame count or fps

Several threads have addressed this issue at videohelp if you search. To summarize, one option is to use avisynth and ffmpegsource2, vegas handles it properly with "disable resample", Adobe internal decoder doesn't handle it very well, unless you use avisynth to frameserve in (I don't have elements, but use PP CS4)

Cool, I will check out vegas. I've tried Ripbot which I think uses avisynth in the background, but the frames were rendered out of order.

Thanks.

[poisondeathray]

Cool, I will check out vegas. I've tried Ripbot which I think uses avisynth in the background, but the frames were rendered out of order.

Thanks.

The reason is ripbot will default to DirectShowSource() and will use whatever directshow decoder you have installed (e.g. ffdshow probably) , and will render out of order because of the frame repeat flag

If you change the script source filter to FFMpegSource2() , it should work fine (You need the plugin separate, I don't think it's bundled with ripbot)

If you just have simple titles to do, and are comfortable with avisynth, you could just use overlay() or subtitle() too, and use ripbot or handbrake