I am very bored tonight since my wife is still visiting her family in South Africa.  I finally decided to sit down and do some speed tests with my M2V-Intra codec presets.  Actually this test doesn't involve Intra frame codecs at all.

It is well known that the normal mpeg2 codec mode in Liquid works super well for HDV material when you fuse.  It does smart rendering and just copies out the frames like it does with DV based material.  EX1 material on the other hand isn't exactly the same as HDV.  EX1 material when fusing has to export in chunks of 15 frames which is much much slower then HDV fusing.  This has always been kind of a bummer for us EX1 users.  I knew Intra frame based codecs would fuse super fast but I thought the EX1 was just SOL for fast fusing.

Well one of the presets I have is a IPB 35 mbit codec designed for EX1 users.  I wasn't exactly sure how well it would work at first although I did notice it was faster.  To be honest I designed these codec presets on a laptop with a very slow hard drive so fusing always went slow for me no matter what.  Well I just did a fuse test of a 60 minute EX1 project.  The first fuse used the normal mpeg2 codec in Liquid.  The time estimate was over 2 hours and you could see 15 frames running at one time in chunks.  I then used my 35 mbit IPB codec preset and I was totally floored at how fast the fuse was.  The estimate was ...

38 minutes!

In fact I'm not even sure it took that long.  In the time it took me to type this post the estimate dropped down to 8 minutes.  I could get it to go even faster but I'm fusing to the same source drive right now.  If I did a fuse from one raid drive to another raid drive this process would blow you away.  I am very happy with these results.

 Any user who uses the EX1 or the EX3 should really use my 35 mbit IPB preset as it will make Liquid a highly competitive system for this format.  The only downside we still face with Liquid is exporting of other formats from a HD time line.  That is why I highly suggest fusing to a HD file and using a 3rd party program to convert with.  I am currently working on a encoder for Liquid users that will allow batch encoding and converting.  With this tool Liquid users can do quick fuses and then load all of those into the encoder and let it go over night.  Sure this method may take up a lot a drive space but drive space is so cheap these days it isn't really that big of a deal.  Think of this tool as our own version of the Adobe media encoder in CS4.

Hey, Thomas...  Boy, must a slow old night at the Smet house tonight....

 We've been using the 35Mb setting pretty much since the day you released the mod. Primarily with footage (??) from EX3's (which is the same as the EX1 anyway).... Liquid really does have this workflow down pat....  We're also now running MC, but if it's ever OUR choice of picking MC or Liquid for doing a project that originates from the XDCAM series or camera's, everyone here still picks a Liquid machine... And you're right... usually the time indicator on the render screen does come down pretty quickly - especially if you've got a decent processor under the hood...

Ditto on using 3rd party apps for encoding to other fomats... Using the "watch" folders on a network with Procoder works really well... It also means that the edit machines are only tied up while they're actually fusing - as soon as that's finished, we have another machine on the network that does the encoding to WMV, mov etc...

 All in all, the Big L is still my favorite....

Remember my issue with AVCHD converted to HD MPEG-2 (see others threads)....

This could be a good solution if I know how to convert my AVCHD to EX1-like: could you give me the MPEG-2 parameters of the EX1 files so I can try converting my AVCHD to that format and use your 35 Mbps codec ?

If you convert to HDV like mpeg2 and edit is a normal Liquid HDV timeline it should work the same way.  For your specific problem there is something going wrong with the translation from AVCHD to mpeg2.  If I remember correctly you were usinng TMPGenc correct?

Have you tried exporting from Tmpgenc as a Picvideo mjpeg avi file?  This mthod should eliminate any odd translation issues since a mjpeg file is pretty basic and straight forward.  Not to mention these files will scrub super smooth in Liquid and perform very well.

If you want to try the 35 mbit mode then it is just IPB 15 frame based for NTSC 1920x1080 Main profile/high level.  For Pal you would use a 12 frame IPB value.  Thats pretty much it really.  The EX1 cameras use VBR encoding while the Liquid tool uses CBR.  It only uses CBR when rendering new segments.  It still copies the VBR data to the new fused file if there are no changes on the timeline.

For 35 mbits CBR and VBR will look the same.  There is a misconception that VBR looks better but all VBR means is that instead of always being 35 mbits it can go lower to save space.  If 35 mbits was the average value then yes VBR would be better but in the case of the EX1 the 35 mbits is the max value so a CBR 35 mbit video will look the same if not slightly better although chances are it will be larger in size. 

Hey guys,

  I think I'm having some success with MPEG-2 as an intermediate format for AVCHD.

My logic went like this:

Create a 30sec colour clip.

Export to HD MPEG2 (1920x1080i)

Re-import this and double check that renderless Fuse works OK. This gives me a target MPEG2 file that I know works OK and that I can adjust other transcoders to match.

Spend 2 or more hours fiddling with TMPGENC and GSpot playing "spot the difference".

I now have a TMPGENC output preset which appears to give me HD MPEG2 files that LE fast fuses (i.e. direct copy). They scrub real nice ;-)

Just checking it with a larger chunk of video. If it's confirmed then I'll post the TMPGENC preset for everyone to use.

 regards.

OK, unless I'm mistaken, this preset seems to work correctly. Grab it while you can as I'm not going to host it forever ;-)

 Feedback appreciated. From what I remember, it all started going smoothly once I started using VBR. The give away

was GSpot was showing no difference before and after Fusing but file sizes were different. Don't ask me why this works.

Jason

 For those that don't want to use TMPGENC but a dffierent transcoder, these are the settings I used:

1920x1080i MP@HL 25fps (UK here ;-) ) VBR

DC comp pres : 8bit

Interlaced, Top field first, GOP BBIBBPBBPBBP, seq header for each GOP

MPEG STD quantisation matrix, ITU-R BT.709 colour