HD TV editing solution

[heather]

I am new at the HD TV Encoding and editing but from research on this forum have had a lot of help. Thanks to all posters.

We use Pinnacle HD TV NanoStick (73e) which plugs into a USB port on our computer.

It gets down some great quality image and sound but the files are gigantic - 8 to 9 gig for an hour and a quarter recording. We could record in DivX but need a Dual Core processor :-(

So our final solution which gives us great quality is to save the HD Video in PS which is default in the TVCentre programme used to capture the TV signals and process them; use ProjectX to Demux the file; use Mplex1.exe to Remux the m2v and ac3 file; use Avidemux to Edit and compress the file to MPG which is about 800MB - much better than the original 8 gigs.

mplex1.exe runs from the commandline so being a hobby programmer we made a front end to use mplex1.exe.

We really have the whole process streamlined for our own use.

Attached is the small utility we use to run the mplex1.exe program.

And thanks very much to mplex1.exe author as it really works with great quality in its reproduction of the two files created from ProjectX.

No more out of sync movies and lots of Disc space saved.

[tre31]

For HD (mpeg-2) editing I use this process:
- capture using whatever in .ts format
- cut of start & end overlap with projectx - demux
- edit out anything extra (ads) using cuttermaran
- prepare for encode by loading mpeg-2 video into dgindex - save project giving you the .d2v project file which you can then use in megui (avisynth creator).
- encode HD mpeg-2 source using megui too 720p x264 format (2 hour movie = 1 dvd very good quality) - DXVA HD high quality megui profile, if you wanted too reduce size (1 cd per hour) you could use DXVA SD high quality profile and resize too dvd resolution 16:9 (720x576 PAL or 720x480 NTSC - you can set 16:9 aspect ratio in the resulting mkv output later on when remuxing video & audio using mkvmerge from mkvtoolnix).

Both the quality and compression using those methods are pretty much as good as it gets at this point in time.

The problem I see with what you are doing there (still not even sure what format the output is in? avidemux -> mpg ? shouldn't the output be .avi and use a avi compliant codec - eg xvid?)
is you are either compressing mpeg-2 too mpeg-1 - large loss of quality, or you are compressing too an mpeg-4 based codec using avidemux such as xvid - while the quality of that is good, x264 is better.

Anyway, hope that gives you a hint on some ideas.

[halsboss]

Too many steps, too hard. Do it in VideoReDo TV Suite ... http://www.videoredo.com/en/
Cheap at twice the price.

[heather]

The problem I see with what you are doing there (still not even sure what format the output is in? avidemux -> mpg ? shouldn't the output be .avi and use a avi compliant codec - eg xvid?)
is you are either compressing mpeg-2 too mpeg-1 - large loss of quality, or you are compressing too an mpeg-4 based codec using avidemux such as xvid - while the quality of that is good, x264 is better.

Output - We get excellent DVD quality. The Finished Format is in MPEG-2, compatible with DVD standards with Avidemux. Only takes 3 hours overall to do the whole operation on a 1hr 15 min capture (about 45 min actual TV is used in final Production - cutting adverts etc.)

Thanks for your input tre31 and i will give it a go.

halsbos - yep good product have tried it out but it does not do any compression unless u get the TV Suite as you mention but a bit costly!

[heather]

I have now dropped using mplex1.exe and do the remuxing with AVIDEMUX.

Only need two progs now! Avidemux and ProjectX