@jak.willis

I did a couple of test runs. I burnt a BD ISO. I then took the m2ts from that ISO and put it in a new Magix project. I then burnt that to BD ISO. The Smart Copy box was available, so I ticked. That then made the Smart render box become active so I ticked that. But when I clicked the SR info button, the box showed that no files were going to be SR, and when I burnt it, there was no smart rendering. If any file was going to be SR, it would have been the one Magix created itself, but no luck.

When I try just exporting as a normal MPEG-4 H264 file, smart render won't work then either - even though it says it can and will do beforehand.

Where are you seeing this? I can't remember back to MEP 2019 but I don't think you've ever been able to SR an plain old MPEG 4 (H264). VDL 2026 has a Smart Copy tick box but it is always greyed-out for H264 exports.

And Magix simply duplicated the frames (PSF) to create the 50i file.

@jak.willis, @Bol, @AAProds

Hi Jak

. . . . I downloaded them as 1080p . . . .

In which case use these files in your project and let MEP do the one conversion necessary, any 'losses' are likely to be undetectable to the human eye as you are not upscaling the resolution.

Hi Rob

. . . . posed the question to Copilot (AI) . . . .

Looks like CoPilot has scraped responses from the forum and manuals, however its summary is correct.

Smart copy, and Smart Render which is not mentioned, do work under the very specific conditions mentioned for AVCHD video, as Al has mentioned MPEG-2 appears to be not working, tested in VDL 2026.

John EB

@AAProds - Progressive to Interlaced conversion. As requested here's a small zip file to download. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1d4vJujeRaRIq4xidmKM0vgwvJ1DA3RdR/view?usp=sharing

It contains two 6 second files. Original Progressive mp4 and Interlaced m2ts.

The Original Progressive file is from my middle range Android phone 30 fps. The picture quality isn't as good as my AVCHD 50i camera but has leaf movement to help show the frames.

The Interlaced file is a render of the original file to a 30 fps interlaced file (sometimes called 60i which can cause confusion).

Playing the files they appear the same but when you use a player that can advance the video one frame at a time (such as MPC-HC/BE or VLC you should find:

• Original Progressive - there are 30 frames per second and the image changes every frame.
• Interlaced - there are 60 frames per second and the image changes every other frame. In other words the 60 frames contain 30 different frames each being displayed twice.

Anyway it's all academic if jak follows your and John's suggestions.

@ericlnz

Thanks Eric, Vegas "i" is the same as Video Deluxe "i": Progressive segmented frames. We VDL users just have to go via the Bluray burn process to achieve that. Magix probably decided way back that there would be little demand for exporting to interlaced unless you were authoring a disk, and incorporated it in the burn process.

@ericlnz

I tried what you said about using Shutter Encoder to re-wrap in mts, but when I import it into Magix the video is blank.

@jak.willis

I did a couple of test runs. I burnt a BD ISO. I then took the m2ts from that ISO and put it in a new Magix project. I then burnt that to BD ISO. The Smart Copy box was available, so I ticked. That then made the Smart render box become active so I ticked that. But when I clicked the SR info button, the box showed that no files were going to be SR, and when I burnt it, there was no smart rendering. If any file was going to be SR, it would have been the one Magix created itself, but no luck.

When I try just exporting as a normal MPEG-4 H264 file, smart render won't work then either - even though it says it can and will do beforehand.

Where are you seeing this? I can't remember back to MEP 2019 but I don't think you've ever been able to SR an plain old MPEG 4 (H264). VDL 2026 has a Smart Copy tick box but it is always greyed-out for H264 exports.

 

The last two screenshots are from the burn menu when I was trying to burn to BD. It says it can Smartcopy and then it completes Smartcopy with errors. Confusing.

@jak.willis I also subsequently had problems with mts files I created from Shutter Encoder when experimenting. Unfortunately m2ts wasn't available as an option.

Anyway it's academic now as you are going to have to re-render your mp4 files to disc compliant files and as others have suggested just let MEP do it during disk creation.

What I'd like to know when you have done this is whether you can see any image quality depreciation.

@jak.willis

Interesting. The cynic in me says that Magix had problems with Smart Copying and Rendering and have tightened up on the file compliance, so much so it won't even smart copy one of it's own AVCHDs in the latest versions.

@johnebaker

In which case use these files in your project and let MEP do the one conversion necessary, any 'losses' are likely to be undetectable to the human eye as you are not upscaling the resolution.

Yes, but I thought that any kind of re-encoding means another layer of compression regardless? Or is that not the case in this instance due to the scan type being the only thing changed? (As in 1080p to 1080i)

@jak.willis

Interesting. The cynic in me says that Magix had problems with Smart Copying and Rendering and have tightened up on the file compliance, so much so it won't even smart copy one of it's own AVCHDs in the latest versions.

@AAProds Well that’s what I can’t understand, because, as you saw in the screenshots I posted, Magix states that it can and will smart render or smart copy ALL of the files. So how can it say that then not do it? I don’t get it.

@jak.willis

Jak, yes, as I said, interesting. To put it more bluntly, MEP2019 is 6 versions old. It may have been a bug then. The latest version doesn't behave like MEP 2019; it doesn't say it will but then doesn't.

Contrary to my comment previously, I have discovered that VDL 2026 will smart-render when creating a Bluray disk. I used to source files, 1/being the m2ts that VDL produced via the Bluray process, and 2/an m2ts created using one of the AVCHD presets. Weirdly, while VDL said it would not SR, it actually did, because a "Smart Render Info" button appeared on the main Burn screen, which, when clicked, displayed the file that it used:

This doesn't help you though because you would need to recode your Neighbours video into m2ts/AVCHD first, which you may as well do simply via the Bluray Burn process.

Again, just give it a test run. When you've set up the Burn encoding settings (nice high bitrate), click the "Encode in Directory" button and it will create all the Bluray folders in there. The Stream folder holds the movie's m2ts which you can compare with the original.