With the advent of AVCHD high definition video on conventional DVDs I recently started the quest for a low cost, high definition authoring solution. Up to this point the only solutions were in software packages costing $500 usd and up. Vegas 9 and other editors will now produce suitable high definition MPEG-4 movies but until now there has not been a reliable, lower cost authoring solution. I recently received an upgrade offer from Nero for Nero version 10. I knew that Nero Vision 5, part of the Nero 8 package, would author AVCHD on conventional media but it seemed to have problems using the various MPEG-4 movies produced by Vegas 9. I am happy to say that Nero 10 does work and my first simple test movie looks marvelous!
Surprise - Nero 10 didn't give me an option to select what files were associated with it but a cursory check shows that none of my media file associations have changed. <shrug> I did de-select the option to have the Ask toolbar.
My first impressions of Nero 10 are pretty good. The manuals, as usual, don't give you much hand holding but the few things I tried seem to work. Nero Vision 5 has been bumped to Nero Vision "Xtra." Seems Nero is following the marketing lemmings and naming version 10 as version X. The icons on my Desktop and in my Start Menu say Nero Vision 10. There is now no need to buy a Blu-ray option since all high definition is supported standard. (Edit: not so for Roxio)
The editor in Nero Vision has been greatly enhanced. It reminds me of the editors in Corel DVD MovieFactory but it also supports keyframing! Pretty nice. It accepted the .m2ts file output from Vegas 9 with no problems and I used it to just whack the first 10 seconds off my test video where I had added the 'poor man's' DVD menu in Vegas 9.
The very first thing I did in Nero Vision Xtra was to configure the AVCHD codec. I went to More/ Recording Format and selected the AVCHD(TM) option. In 'Configure Encoder.....' I selected 'Highest' quality and in 'Encoding Mode:' I selected 'High Quality (2-Pass VBR)'. Clicking OK produces a window asking 'Do you want these settings to become the new default?' I clicked 'Yes' because I am not interested in producing a disk with anything less than the best possible visual quality.
I was able to get Nero Vision 10 to auto-detect chapter/scene changes and then I adjusted the chapter points where I really wanted them. This was a bit "fiddly" but worked OK. I deleted several others so my 18 minute test video had 6 markers. I was then able to stumble through adopting a canned DVD menu and I figured out how to change the default Chapter 1, Chapter 2 and so on to some meaningful names. The menu I used was named 'Movement' and showed three chapters on each chapter menu. Each of the menu thumbnails was in motion, playing that segment of video. Nice!
I placed a conventional DVD in my DVD burner and told Nero 10 to go to work. It began crunching away using all four cores but not 100 percent. While it crunched it notified what it was doing and displayed the video portion it was working on in the window. Within a minute it displayed "SmartRender" and the motion of the video display sped up very noticeably. Unfortunately, I didn't record the time needed to produce the finished disk but I was very pleased with the result.
My test video consists of three of the most challenging videos I have. The first is of a winter storm with falling snow. The snow in the far distance was very hard for many of the AVCHD codecs to reproduce without smearing. It was followed by a view from my porch at night with 6 inches of fallen snow. The contrast was very high and these codecs had trouble with that, too. The second portion was a hiking trip to Mount Rainier where I taped closeups of a tiny trickling stream with moss and tiny plants. Detail and motion - hard to replicate. The third segment was a wedding where the ceremony was in a darkened sanctuary. The HV20 (on Cine Mode- always) reproduced the dark tuxes in a darkened room beautifully and most of the codecs did OK. NV10 did very well. The last segment was the wedding reception which was held in a poorly lit room. I must say here that Vegas 9 did the best job of any of the editors in boosting the video brightness and saturation and the result from NV10 was gorgeous. I may have to send the couple a new disk!
Nero 10 was a 292 GB download so I'm glad I'm in town now with Comcast 12 Mb service. The deal included a 'free' copy of Media Home'. There are additional DVD menu templates, theme packs, image packs, clipart and a sample video. Good thing we have large hard drives these days!
Correction: 292 MB