Re: Novice: First steps with VirtualDub

Terry Pinnell wrote:

apps are still lacking in this regard.) There are specialized MPEG
editors such as "TMPGEnc MPEG Editor" or "VideoReDo", or "Womble
MPEG Video Wizard"

I have TMPGEnc. It's a trial, and the MPEG2 facility has expired.

Note that TMPGEnc Plus (the MPEG encoder) is not the same thing as TMPGEnc MPEG Editor (the MPEG editor).

Yes, just learned about that DV AVI option [in Windows Movie
Maker 2.0]. But it turned my 4MB MPG into about 150MB!

That's to be expected; the DV format has a fixed bitrate of 25 Mbit/s, a fixed frame rate, and a fixed frame size. (Which also means that Movie Maker probably resized your original video images from 160×112 pixels to 720×576. Talk about redundancy!)

The conversion was a confused process of trial and error. I'll have to
repeat it fairly soon before I forget how I did it. Do you know of a
table or matrix somewhere showing what SW converts one format to
another please?


No, unfortunately I don't.

Indeed. This codec stuff is entirely new to me, and hence
one more black art!


Maybe this will help to get you started:

<http://www.cdmenupro.com/tutor_avicodec.htm>

For a more detailed explanation, see:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codec>
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_codec>

Also, I gather it's important to know what audio and video codecs your
*source* file 'have' (if that's the right term).

Yes. That's good thinking. Knowing the exact details of your source format can help in many ways.

Note that there are numerous container formats (see <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Container_format>) and codecs operate within the framework each of these provides. It is often the case that a particular codec is only available for a particular container format. Sometimes there are exceptions, though. For example, DV video can be stored in both AVI and QuickTime containers for the simple reason that there are DV codec implementations for both frameworks. In this case the wrapper format is different, but the actual video and audio data may be exactly the same.

Since that first tentative conversion, I've installed a couple of
utilities for analysing that: afreeCodecVT, and AVIcodec.


You might also want to try GSpot.

But interpreting what they
tell me in examples like these

[...]

LED-Sequencer4MB-1b.avi
File  :  8.53 MB (8.53 MB),  duration: 0:00:44,  type: AVI,  1 audio
stream(s),  quality: 52 %
Video :  7.69 MB,  1463 Kbps,  25.0 fps,  320*240 (4:3),  CRAM =
Unknown,    Supported
Audio :  859 KB,  160 Kbps,  44100 Hz,  2 channels,  0x161 = Windows
Media Audio V2,    Supported

is beyond me.

Well, there's the size of the file in its entirety: 8.53 MB. Then there's the duration - 44 seconds. It is also told that the container format is AVI, and that there is only one audio stream, which has been encoded with the quality setting of 52%.

The video stream takes up 7.69 MB in total, 1,463,000 bits per second. The frame rate is 25 frames per second, and the video resolution is 320×240 pixels with the aspect ratio of 4:3. The four-letter video codec identifier (FOURCC) is "CRAM", which means the "Microsoft Video 1" codec has been used - even though the program you used for digging out the information does not seem to recognize that and identifies it as "Unknown".

The audio stream takes up 859 KB. It has been encoded using the bitrate of 160,000 bits per second. The sample rate is 44.1 samples per second, and there are two channels (so it's a stereo soundtrack). The sound codec is identified as being Windows Media Audio V2.

(I have a hunch that the codec used for the audio track probably explains the problems with VirtualDub. VirtualDub is not a very "Windows Media" friendly editor - especially after Microsoft contacted the author and ordered him to remove the built-in ASF/WMV support.)

Agreed, but in this particular case, quality is of low priority. I'm
going to try it again anyway when I get time, to hopefully get some
idea of the effect of using different codecs. Is there a relatively
small subset you could recommend please? Otherwise the combinations
possible (audio/video) run into hundreds!

The useful AVI video codecs are pretty much as follows: uncompressed, HuffYUV, Alparysoft lossless codec, M-JPEG (there are several implementations), DV (there are several implementations of this as well), and XviD. Of these, only XviD is suitable for Internet distribution. Others are more or less the kind of formats which you can use for acquisition and editing, but not for publishing.

As for the useful AVI audio codecs, the list is shorter still: uncompressed PCM audio in its various forms, and MP3.

There may be some others, but not many.

(The bunch of AVI codecs that comes with Windows is mostly outdated stuff no-one uses any longer.)

It turned out his WMP was version 6! Now updated to WMP9 (same as
mine). Have yet to hear from him, but assume he can now play the WMV.
So further work on AVI and MPG conversions can now proceed as a
learning exercise, unhampered by any immediate practical need <g>.

Yeah, suspected something like that. Good thing if the actual problem was solved.

As mentioned, trialing Womble. Pretty expensive though, for a
user who is only dabbling in this on a casual basis. On the other
hand, that hasn't always stopped me buying nice tools in the past...

Womble is on the heavy side for an MPEG-oriented editor, but not when compared to "real" NLEs.

Option 3: Use some other, more generic-purpose editor than
Movie Maker: one, which will allow you to save directly to
the format of your choice, instead of forcing you to use
the proprietary WMV format and intermediate lossy
conversion steps.

That sounds like heavyweight (=expensive) SW? 

Depends. There are tryout versions available:

<http://www.adobe.com/products/premiere/main.html>
<http://www.sonymediasoftware.com/products/vegasfamily.asp>
<http://www.avid.com/freedv/index.asp>
<http://www.ulead.com/msp/runme.htm>
<http://www.ulead.com/vs/runme.htm>

(Well, Avid Free DV is actually free, but quite limited.)

If I had to do it this way, I would do it using AviSynth (Google for
that) and VirtualDub in combination, and XviD for the final target
codec. See <http://www.doom9.org/index.html?/wmv2avi.htm>.
(Frameserving the WMV from AviSynth to VirtualDub removes the need
to use the WVM->AVI converter you used.)


You're beginning to lose me there! Maybe it will become clearer
after experiment. So far I found AviSynth v2.56 Beta 3 at
http://www.afterdawn.com/software/video_software/video_tools/avisynth.cfm
but it looks heavy.


1) Install AviSynth

2) Create a text file in Notepad with the following line in it:

DirectShowSource("LED-Sequencer4MB.wmv",fps=25)

3) Save the file to the same directory with the WMV video clip.

4) Rename the .txt file to an .avs file. (If you don't see the filename extensions, you will need to enable them in the Windows Explorer settings.)

5) Drag & drop the .avs file into VirtualDub.

6) Now you can use VirtualDub for saving a copy of the video with any available AVI codec.

If you want MPEG, instead, I would install a demo version of TMPGEnc
and open the AviSynth script (that frameserves the WMV file) in
there.

I have the TMPGEnc demo version.

As mentioned above, you can open the .avs file as a source file for encoding in there, too.

I did get a sort of 'codec package' yesterday, called K-Lite
Full, from
http://www.free-codecs.com/K_Lite_Codec_Pack_download.htm
but I stopped short of installing it. For a start, it says:
"It is highly recommended to first uninstall other codec
related packages before installing this package," yet I'm
not sure whether or not I *have* any. And then it offered
a *very* long list, most checked by default. In my state
of ignorance, I felt it was too risky to proceed.

Some people use these huge codec packs like the above, but as you already suspected yourself, they may sometimes cause problems, conflicts or unstability. Installing a huge combined collection of whatever system components nilly-willy is usually not a good idea.

I tend to only install codecs "on need" basis.

--
znark

.

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