After working with AS for many hours it is clearly MUCH faster than S14 as far as background rendering and working on the timeline. A typical clip (30 second 720p mp4) with an intense effect such as Magic Bullet Looks background renders in a matter of seconds and 1080p clips not much longer. S14 on my system takes several minutes for the same effect to render.

The added performance makes it more than worth dealing with the issues I've encountered.

 

Hi Jim,

How's the CPU usage differ between the two, when rendering? Is AS definitely using all cores more effectively than S14?
Looking to upgrade to something similar to what you have so performance is certainly of interest.

Regards

Colin

cr1:

Hi Jim,

How's the CPU usage differ between the two, when rendering? Is AS definitely using all cores more effectively than S14?
Looking to upgrade to something similar to what you have so performance is certainly of interest.

Regards

Colin

Yep, it lights up all 8 cores. 

I would agree.  I worked on a project for a few hours yesterday and I didn't even notice the background rendering.  In Studio 14 I had to turn it off because it slowed down my work-flow.

How do you find final render times though? I'm moving from Powerdirector 9 (very buggy) and choosing a 1080 render with exactly the same properties on the same 1:17 clip took 40 seconds in PD and 1:29 in AS.

Powerdirect boasts Smartrender for AVCHD, doesn't it? (they call it something else). To compare like for like you need to turn that off.

Obviously, it would be good if AvStudio had that feature, but it doesn't speed up the render of any clips with effects added.

jjn:

... AVCHD ... Obviously, it would be good if AvStudio had that feature, but it doesn't speed up the render of any clips with effects added.

Can anyone test the time it takes AS to render 1:00 of effect-free AVCHD clips to an AVCHD-DVD or BD-R disc image?  Perhaps AS recodes exports to file, but could it possibly avoid recoding of unadulterated clips concatenated to a disc image?  Or, if one edits clips, then exports them to a single (recoded) file, and then uses that file to create a disc, will AS recode it again?  Or will it "pass through" the file, without recoding or degradation, so long as its format conforms to the disc format parameters?  This is what the "smart render" of Nero 8 amounted to.

jjn:

Powerdirect boasts Smartrender for AVCHD, doesn't it? (they call it something else). To compare like for like you need to turn that off.

Obviously, it would be good if AvStudio had that feature, but it doesn't speed up the render of any clips with effects added.

The speed quoted for PD was with SVRT off and hardware acceleration off. Switching hardware acceleration on in PD degrades the quality of the final render. I don't see anywhere is AS to use hardware acceleration. 

mikescholes:

jjn:

Powerdirect boasts Smartrender for AVCHD, doesn't it? (they call it something else). To compare like for like you need to turn that off.

Obviously, it would be good if AvStudio had that feature, but it doesn't speed up the render of any clips with effects added.

The speed quoted for PD was with SVRT off and hardware acceleration off. Switching hardware acceleration on in PD degrades the quality of the final render. I don't see anywhere is AS to use hardware acceleration. 

I have PowerDirector 9 and it screams through converting clips with all sorts of effects applied using hardware acceleration. I can't detect any degradation. But PD9 comes up way short on useful quality effects and correction capabilities and there is NO audio meter to monitor levels - so it's not even in the same league as AS.

I would agree, AS has a lot more to offer than PD9, it just would have been nice if it matched the speed of PD9 both on the timeline and when final rendering. When I render the same clip twice in PD9 with HA on and off I can definitely pick up a loss in quality with HA on. It's not obvious but when you look closely at edges (In my flying videos I look at hedge lines) you can see artefacts with HA on. Almost like a jpeg with a bit too much compression. There is a lot on the PD forums about this and the guys with experience nearly all say they switch HA off. Now with AS I don't see any reference to hardware acceleration anywhere in the program. I wonder if they just haven't implemented it.