AVCHD vs Lagarith

R

Ryan McCarvill

Well-known member
Hey guys,

I recently purchased Vegas Pro (first time user) as part of my new editing setup - I am liking it so far.

I have a quick question, I am shooting 1080x25p AVCHD files, now while my dual core 1.8ghz computer makes a valiant effort to preview the AVCHD files in real time I am worrying that the compression will make the editing a little slower and the intraframe codec may cause problems. I was thinking about converting my footage to Lagarith (space is not an issue, edit in Lagarith, archive in AVCHD) - I am wondering if anyone has used Lagarith on big projects, from what I read it stands up well to conversion - so I guess: Does it make editing and previewing quicker? Does it make cuts smoother? Does it stand up better to effects, grading, transitions, etc? Does it allow you to make multiple generation changes without much loss?

My guess is yes to all - so I guess is it worth the hard drive space and time to re-encode?
 
Lagarith is many times slower than AVCHD. I don't recommend it for anything other than last breath solution.

Your best bets are:
1. Edit in AVCHD. Use this guide to maximize preview speed: http://eugenia.gnomefiles.org/2008/12/19/sony-vegas-hints-and-tips/
2. Buy Cineform NeoSCENE or use my batch Avid DNxHD tutorial. Lossless, much faster than Lagarith (especially Cineform). http://eugenia.gnomefiles.org/2009/11/20/loading-canon-digicamdslr-footage-on-avid-mc4/
3. Buy a faster PC. AVCHD seems to need about 2.2 Ghz DualCore or faster, with 3 GBs of RAM to be comfortable-enough.
 
Thanks Eugenia,

Your site has proven to be very useful once again. However money is a little tight at the moment, my computer has 3gigs of Ram in it but am stuck with the 1.8ghz processor (I suppose I could overclock).

Has anyone tried HUFFYUV?

I suppose I will stick with the AVCHD files and keep the preview settings low.
 
I've use all these codecs. Cineform will be fastest, HuffYUV second, and Lagarith will be slowest. But Huff is a lot closer to Lagarith than Cineform. A LOT closer.
 
Thanks PerroneFord, is Huff noticeably faster than AVCHD?

Is it a better idea to edit in a lossless codec space, speed and money not being any object?

I have read from Sony that Vegas doesn't decompress AVCHD files so that unless the frame has changed it will be passed straight through to the output file, however realistically everything is going to have a little bit of color correction so we are going to lose a generation straight away. It's infuriating that there doesn't appear to be clear answers to these questions, or none that I can find anyway.

I would be running these tests myself but I have just done a rebuild of my computer and don't want to pollute it with conversion software and unused codecs. My other computer is a Mac so it isn't a relevant benchmark for a vegas machine - help from anyone that has gone through the process is most appreciated.
 
>is Huff noticeably faster than AVCHD?

No, it's slower. As I said above, if by using my tips you get real time preview, keep AVCHD as is.
 
Thanks Euginia,

That's exactly what I wanted to hear, I guess that I just thought that such a highly compressed format would have many drawbacks over an uncompressed format.

One more question, do people who use Cineform use it only as an editing proxy or do they do the final grade, transitions, and export, etc on it as well?

Thanks

- Ryan
 
Eugenia Loli-Queru said:
If you're using Cineform, you use it all the way. It's an intermediate format, not a proxy.
Click to expand...

Great, I thought so, I was just reading that it was a lossy format (although visually lossless) so I figured that for greater latitude it wasn't the best format to choose.

Anyway just got home from work, booted up vegas, unchecked scale media and its previewing absolutely perfectly now.

Thank you very much.
 
Would just like to chip in that HMC150 AVCHD footage in Vegas Pro 8.0c runs like a DOG on my Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 which is overclocked to 3.4GHz per core (up from 2.4GHz each). Thats with Samsung F1 1tb drives and 4GB of RAM.

I couldnt live with it.

I spent a small amount of cash on NeoScene and havent looked back.
 
Seems like Vegas 9 is a little bit more optimised then. I still get a bit of chop when I have overlapping AVCHD clips, however in general I preview at full speed (albeit at quater resolution and preview (auto) as my settings, so potentially low quality).
 
This might interest some people... a while back I built myself a base setup for editing my GH1 AVCHD videos and had a thread about it: Building a cheap ~$400 video editing PC running diary

Quad Core 3.5GHZ overclocked Phenom II 940BE with 4GB of RAM

It works quite well for doing multi track video edits. I get smooth video preview in Vegas, even multi-camera stuff. In Best Quality on the preview window as well. Best Quality sometimes can take a second to start going smoothly but it's still smooth... unless there's some kind of effect or filter that would slow it down. There I could use more power.

The biggest problem is that the renders could be faster. It's a Phenom II system, and i7 is much faster for rendering.

I spent $400 on the initial build and since have put much more money into it. That includes $ spent on cooling equipment to overclock it, which someone could get for $80. So yeah, if you're looking for an AVCHD editing solution, you can get it for cheap.

Just for fun, and hopefully for others interest I'll part out a basic i7 system (pretty much the fastest rendering CPU right now) that could be overclocked. Will edit later with the price and parts.
 
yabyum said:
This might interest some people... a while back I built myself a base setup for editing my GH1 AVCHD videos and had a thread about it: Building a cheap ~$400 video editing PC running diary

Quad Core 3.5GHZ overclocked Phenom II 940BE with 4GB of RAM

It works quite well for doing multi track video edits. I get smooth video preview in Vegas, even multi-camera stuff. In Best Quality on the preview window as well. Best Quality sometimes can take a second to start going smoothly but it's still smooth... unless there's some kind of effect or filter that would slow it down. There I could use more power.
Click to expand...

Your GH1 has one of the lowest bit rates of any of the AVCHD cameras out there. It's less than half the bit rate of a 5D and approaching a third of the rate of the 7D. It's also 25% less than the HMC150.

So the performance you see in the timeline is not typical for data from other cameras.
 
Just adding an update in case anyone comes searching for this (I was just searching for codec comparisons and this topic was often at the top of google search). I have just completed a couple of projects with a 2.4ghz dual core with 8gb of RAM and still find AVCHD to be cumbersome to edit with. I have done a quick comparision between the various codecs available and have found that the Avid DNXHD codec to be far and away the best free codec. The question is how much of a loss does it incur? Nothing to my eye (I always output at 100% quality) but I'm sure that there is a hit, and there are probably graphs somewhere to back this up. The other issue is that its more than ten times larger than AVCHD files, however storage is cheap, certainly cheaper than replacing a PC.
 
As an asside, has anyone had experience with the UT Codec and Vegas, I installed it but can not seem to find any information on how to encode to it or decode from it.
 
PerroneFord said:
I've use all these codecs. Cineform will be fastest, HuffYUV second, and Lagarith will be slowest. But Huff is a lot closer to Lagarith than Cineform. A LOT closer.
Click to expand...

One problem you'll run into with HuffYUV, Lagarith, and even Cineform on occasion is that your CPU is not longer the bottleneck -- your HDD has now replaced it as the weakest link in your process chain. You may not see this during editing, but it's quite possible during editiing, particularly if you have multiple video tracks, large stills, etc.

I have also used HuffYUV and Sony's YUV for fairly short projects with way too many tracks, kind of as an experiment (one music video I did had about 45 compositing layers... I split it between two Vegas projects, just to maintain my sanity). I'm not quite convinced that the YUV-only compression was any win over Cineform in overall performance. In theory, Cineform is far more CPU intensive than HuffYUV or Sony's YUV. But it's also highly optimized.

You really have to try things based on your system, since there are too many variables to proclaim one thing best for everyone. I do find AVCHD editable on my by PC (a bit faster... a 2.83GHz Core 2 Quad), though I also use Cineform. You can improve throughput in a render by moving different assets to different HDDs. The speed of an HDD is quite nice for linear processing, but seeking slows it down. So put all your assets on one drive, render back to that same drive, and you'll find the system slows to a crawl, particularly for very large assets. Spread these intelligently across different drives, and things get much faster.
 
From a recommendation on another thread I have been experimenting with Matrox VfW codecs. I have upped my Ram to 4gb and upgraded to Windows 7 64bit OS - trying to eek as much performance as possible out of my system. They are lossy codecs so I have to keep the bitrate high, I would rather deal with lossless codecs or visually lossless but less efficient codecs if I can.

I'm wondering if at this stage it would be better for me to upgrade my CPU to a quad core or to use a codec with less compression but to get an external RAID 0 box that can connect to my PC via E-SATA. Something like the NexStar 3MX which we use at work (in RAID 1 mode, but can also run in RAID 0).
 
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