Tronic
18th August 2003, 01:05
After digging the net, asking some people developing these tools and doing quite a bit testing...
* You can forget about the .mp4 files (MPEG-4 file format) - it isn't properly supported yet.
* Adobe Premiere is definately not a good choice for this, due to its very limited support for DV and this is not what it has been designed for.
* Ulead MediaStudio *might* work (haven't tested it myself, but some people say it does).
* You can forget the on-fly encoding for now (read the DV to hard disk first, then re-encode). Maybe next year... (one cause for the broken MPEG clips this year could have been the actual hardware, that just couldn't compress all frames fast enough)
The best option seems to be using the latest mencoder version with following command line: (assuming that your material is interlaced)
mencoder input.dv -o output.avi -vop pp=de,field=1,crop=704,scale=384:288 -ovc xvid -xvidencopts me_quality=6:4mv:bitrate=500 -oac mp3lame -lameopts vbr=0:br=128
Unfortunately AVI DV doesn't seem to be supported yet, so you have to use pure DV streams (.dv files).
If all material is progressive (very unlikely), you must remove "field=1," and change the scale= to something bigger (512:384, 640:480 and 704:528 could be good options, and you might want to raise the bitrate a bit too).
You'll want to run a single pretty long testing video via this (because different DV cameras produce different material and your configuration isn't tested yet). If the audio is in sync (especially near end of the file) and the picture looks good, you can encode everything with it.
I've used the method described here for several encodes and it seems to work fine here on any source file.
NOTE: this guide is still under development and doesn't cover too many aspects (NTSC support being one of those). Anyway, feel free to comment, to add your bits of information and especially to notify me about errors.
* You can forget about the .mp4 files (MPEG-4 file format) - it isn't properly supported yet.
* Adobe Premiere is definately not a good choice for this, due to its very limited support for DV and this is not what it has been designed for.
* Ulead MediaStudio *might* work (haven't tested it myself, but some people say it does).
* You can forget the on-fly encoding for now (read the DV to hard disk first, then re-encode). Maybe next year... (one cause for the broken MPEG clips this year could have been the actual hardware, that just couldn't compress all frames fast enough)
The best option seems to be using the latest mencoder version with following command line: (assuming that your material is interlaced)
mencoder input.dv -o output.avi -vop pp=de,field=1,crop=704,scale=384:288 -ovc xvid -xvidencopts me_quality=6:4mv:bitrate=500 -oac mp3lame -lameopts vbr=0:br=128
Unfortunately AVI DV doesn't seem to be supported yet, so you have to use pure DV streams (.dv files).
If all material is progressive (very unlikely), you must remove "field=1," and change the scale= to something bigger (512:384, 640:480 and 704:528 could be good options, and you might want to raise the bitrate a bit too).
You'll want to run a single pretty long testing video via this (because different DV cameras produce different material and your configuration isn't tested yet). If the audio is in sync (especially near end of the file) and the picture looks good, you can encode everything with it.
I've used the method described here for several encodes and it seems to work fine here on any source file.
NOTE: this guide is still under development and doesn't cover too many aspects (NTSC support being one of those). Anyway, feel free to comment, to add your bits of information and especially to notify me about errors.