just checking i am doing this right ....

[DaveQB]

hi,
i am new to this video editing, although done a little bit with the 2 VCR set-up thing, but now want to be a little more sophisticated about it.

what i want to do has two components:

1) i simply copy sporting events (games) from my 8mm video camera to CD (formerly video tapes)

2) make up a highlight tape (now CD) of heaps of like 5 seconds clips.

after doing some reading and experiementing (heaps of trial and error) i think i have got it working, but what i do seems not recommended here

i capture my video using VD and DivX 5 (2200) compression and mp3 (56kbps. that makes one game about 800 megs, nice size as thers about 10 of them.

then my plan is to use TMPEG to convert them to SV-CD or V-CD

as the guys i am handing them out to may or may not have different players, my plan was to use DivX for the guys who have a computer, and (S)V-CD for the guys who have stand-alone DVD players.

i have tested this proceedure and it appears the quality is very close, both on the SV-CD and DivX5 versions, to the original tape.


i think i have got the highlight tape worked out by using TMPEG to join them, not sure about if i need to make a DivX version copies, may have to convert back to DivX after its made in SV-CD(i know sloppy huh!)

where i think i am going to struggle is when i want to mix audio tracks onto the hightlight package.... any good links for audio mixing??

so basicly....is what i am doing right for the best quality and smallest size files ?? any pointers??


thanx in advance

[Arky]

well if your existing method is working ok for you, and you're satisfied with the quality, then I'd stick to it - if it ain't broke, don't fix it etc. etc.

However, I would just point out one thing - it's not good practice to use high compression (which DivX5 is) and then REcompress from the highly compressed source. You'd be better capturing using a less-compressed coded, such as HuffyUV, and THEN encoding your DivX5 from the Huffy file, and then encoding your MPEG2 file from the Huffy File. This should give you far better MPEG2 quality. Only problem with this method is you need one big mother of a hard drive to cope with the HuffyUV file sizes (obviously, since it is, by it's very nature LESS compressed!)


Arky ;o)

[DaveQB]

yeah thats what that site was saying....
but the final SV-CD format quality is pretty good, least i thought it was from the tests i ran....
maybe coz the source, camera tape, isnt the best to start, its good enough

but better quality is what i am after,
and ultimately i am after each game on my spare HDD in both DivX and SV-CD
so using this umm 'huffy' thing willjust mean i have to encode each game at a time,
although i do have some space, bour 30 gigs free, it does eat up fast i have noticed

so whats the scope with this huffy ??
use it thru VD or something ?

can ya point me in the right direction??
(lordy, now i gotta capture 10 , 50 min games , again!! )

[cypher_soundz]

In regards to the audio that you want to mix , try http://www.ulead.com/msp/trial.htm

its either
MediaStudio Pro 6.5
or
Ulead DVD MovieFactory

it is pretty good you can download a 30day trial off the site .
you can mix audio add new audio over existing audio , etc etc , add effects and writing to your video quite easy. there is no need to split video and audio either. Wow i sound like i work for them!

[DaveQB]

hehehe yeah ya do, but that sounds like EXACTLY what i am after, thanx a billion for that.... i'll check it out....

does it just plugin to Virtual Dub??

[cypher_soundz]

No its a stand alone program , but check out *cough* http://www.astalavista.com *cough* No reason wink wink.

glad i could help

[DaveQB]

ok exams are overso got stuck into this video capturing.

tried the huffyUV codec like you guys suggested.

it does eat up some space thats for sure (50mins = 10 gigs)

but the quality is excellent and helps the quality to mpeg2

ok, so i captured it no worries.
then ran it thru VD and had audio on direct stream and added the sharpen filter to the video and cropped the junk at the end and start.

but for some reasn playing that (edited) copy back, i lose sound about 3-4 mins into it and if playing with WinMedia player i get "the file format is invalid"
but not until we hit the 'no sound' part 3-4 mins into it)

i have done this same procedure before on files that were captured in DivX and never had any trouble

and to top it off, when i converted to SV-CD the sound was missing, of course, but it played fine on PowerDVD4. so burnt a few copies for my mates, but they couldnt play them on there Stand-alone DVD players.

is that to do with this problem of VD making it an invalid file format?? ( i am thinking it is)or sometihng else

i am probably missing something simple here, but not being an expert i cant firgure it out.

OH PS i ran the original through VD again ,buyt htis time just trimmed the start and end , but no filter. this one was exactly the same as the other ?!?!

[theReal]

You could also capture with Divx using a fixed quantizer of 2 (or 3). Would be somewhere in between Huffyuv and Divx at 2200 kbit.

[DaveQB]

that sounds good for space.

but i am picking up another HDD tmw (80gig) so space 'shouldnt' be an issue.

any idea why VD is making my file invalid suddenly ??

[theReal]

any idea why VD is making my file invalid suddenly ??

Unfortunately not. Since I installed Divx 5.02, files captured with Divx are ok and I can watch them with no problems, but VDub and avisynth say they have an "input file format error". So, I can't even direct stream copy captured divx5 files anymore, god knows why...
Now I capture with picvideo mjpeg at 768x576 (quality 18 of 20), the filesize is bearable (~1.5 hours on 20 GB) and the quality is really good (would be better with huffyuv, but full resolution huffyuv, oh oh!)