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CirTap
1st April 2005, 00:00
Hi all,

I'm more familiar with the terms and technologies in the audio domain but pretty new to "movie file processing" - which is some different science to me, so there are some terms that constantly strike me.

As I'm not a native english speaker there are some items in the VirtualDub GUI which are as clear as Klingon to me, and it'd be nice if someone could enlighten in me about their meaning and possible usage.
I have not found them "officially" documented in any help file (BDub, VDubMod) or their respective websites. Probably they *are* mentioned in one of the endless amount of threads in the same endless amount of forums covering video editing with or without VDub or appear as a footnote is any of the zillion guides and sources on the web.
I tried to google to unreveil their "secrets" and visited various forums but to no (satisfying) success. Might be the lack of properly phrasing my search though ...

Here we go:

File > Save striped AVI done! info given by neuron2
Certainly those stripes do not apply to shirts and pants, so: What's this "striping description" which is mentioned in the statusbar?
Where does it come from, how do I get/make it, and of course: what's it good for?

File > Save stripe master done! info given by neuron2
No hint in the statusbar. VDub wants a "*.stripe" file as input. Again: how do I create such? What's its content and purpose?

It's even obvious to me that the two are related ;)


File > Load processing settings VERSUS File > Run script still open
Main difference and application?
I discovered by trial and error that loading/saving "processing settings" are useful to save/load the configuration of filters, video/audio compression, but the latter?
Sylia isn't well documented (IMHO, few examples) and obviously not very popular to "script" videos compared to AviSynth. The only useful source on Sylia I found was in the great "VirtualDubMod" help file and an outdated textfile written by Avery from virtualdub.org in the Google-Cache. I can figure the usefullness of Sylia scripts, it's just the file selector which irritates me and lists config files, jobs and scripts for both menu commands - so there *must* be any difference whichever I use.


Options > Performance options found here (http://www.virtualdub.org/docs_faster) thanx to neuron2Short answer: leave them alone.
I presume the higher the better, but are there any recommended values for the buffers? Found 1 (in words ONE) posting without null info.
Are they related to the available RAM (512MB) or the size of the files being processed?
Current settings randomly set by me are: AVI/8MB, Wave/512kB, Stream/64k
Do I need to restart the app when I change them?
What are the tradeoffs when I use too large/small buffer sizes?
Will the buffer size of AVI also affect frameserved AVS scripts or is this only related to "native" AVIs loaded directly?
Any impact on VDub filter performance with high/low buffer sizes?

From the dialog's text I presume
- "AVI buffers" apply to the file loaded (AVS scripts?)
- "WAV buffers" to some WAV file loaded via Audio->WAV audio,
overriding the stream's audio if any.
- "Stream buffers" probably apply to VirtualDub in frameserver mode
Are these assumptions correct?

If I don't use ext. WAVs or VDub as a frameserver, can I set the corresponding buffers to their minimum?


Tools -> Create sparse AVI and Expand sparse AVIdone! info given by neuron2
Another weired file "type". I did this once, got some (much smaller) "foobar.sparse" from "foobar.avi", expanded it back to "foobar2.avi" resulting in the same file size as "foobar.avi" but the 2nd expanded file appeared to be totally useless. For instance it didn't play back in MPC nor VDub, and also GSpot reported it's "invalid".
So is this only a "debug" thing I can fully ignore?

Many thanks in advance for any hints, links, descriptions of the above!

Oh, I'm a developer myself so I know that writing documentation sux, but as a user I'd like to know and learn about the "features" (and possible no-go's) of the apps I use, esp. the stuff I'm confronted with in the GUI ;-) That's all.
In the last few months, I spent a lot of time to decipher many of those common "three letter acronyms" and terms related to the magic science of video editing (how the heck should anyone know from thin air what "CCE" is? -- took me weeks to crack this "TLA" <g>), and this whole subject seems infinite at best.
It's very discouraging if one has to spend hours and days to find either too specific information/guides/tuts (to solve a prob which according to Murphy never is mine) -- or plain void, with many pointing to dead pages, and others totally outdated during the speed of development of some tools/technologies.
This is not a rant, and I don't intend to offend anyone!

I really, really appreciate everybody's work here and the talents of all the developers writing these great tools, but I hope all the "pros" among you understand my little "misery" :-)


t.i.a & have fun,

CirTap

Guest
1st April 2005, 01:35
Originally posted by CirTap
File > Save striped AVI
File > Save stripe master Avery Lee writes:

"These refer to some rather old, deprecated technology -- basically, you can create a control file that specifies an audio file and a number of video files, and instead of capturing or rendering to one AVI, you render to all of them. It's much less useful than segmentation because it scatters video across the tracks in almost random order, trying to balance bytes across all of them, and because it dies at tracks*2GB. You need the old 1.4 help file to figure out how to use it, and it's likely to be dropped in the near future."

>Sparse AVIs

Avery Lee writes:

"A sparse AVI is an AVI file that has had its audio and video data removed, and then its headers rearranged for better compression with zip. When unpacked on the other side, it exactly resembles the original AVI, except that the data blocks are all nulled. The reason for this feature is that if someone has portability troubles with other applications, I can ask them to send me a sparse AVI of the file and I can check that the AVI file that VirtualDub produced was valid. A 1GB AVI capture file can produce sparse file that is less than 100K when zipped. Needless to say, sparse AVIs are useless for transferring data.

I had an idea back for another type of sparse file, which was one that only included a single keyframe each from blocks of video delimited by scene changes. That would produce a sort of "blurb" video file, to make it easier to search for a scene. I never implemented it, though, because I wasn't quite sure what I would do with it."

>Performance options

See VirtualDub help pages.

CirTap
1st April 2005, 01:40
neuron2,

thanx - two less to bother with :-)

Where did Avery wrote this? Maybe this (older?) source has more information I can use?

Have fun,
CirTap

Guest
1st April 2005, 02:44
I found that material by doing searches at the VirtualDub forum:

http://forums.virtualdub.org

CirTap
1st April 2005, 16:48
neuron2,

I was searching that board with no results: now I just realized, that it's an IPB board with the annoying default: "limit to last 30 days" %-/
should have known better ...

Thanx.

CirTap