After a series of email exchanges with Kenzi at Pegasys (difficult at best since English is definitely not his primary language, and I do not speak Japanese at all), I think we have established the problem I've been seeing with TMPGEnc Plus.

According to Kenzi, who ran some tests, Quicktime video that is imported via the QTREADER.VFP plugin, is reported to TMPGEnc as running at 600 fps -- regardless of its actual framerate. When TMPGEnc converts this to 29.97 fps for DVD, frames get repeated every couple of minutes due to the fact that 600 and 29.97 are not evenly divisible.

I did a little research and it appears that the plugin was written by a James Hoderness (see http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/4942/svcd.html) as freeware. Holderness evidently does not wish to be contacted by anyone, and has no email address or contact info anywhere on the Internet. Consequently there is no way to tell him the plugin has this problem, there is no way to get it fixed, and there is no way to obtain the source code so someone else can get it fixed.

The problem for us is that the video we're trying to encode is coming out of a $150,000 Avid Symphony edit system, which is based on Quicktime. It can output AVI files, but there is a 2GB limit on an AVI output from an Avid, which amounts to about two minutes of video, plus it takes nearly as long to output an AVI as it does to render the MPG file itself, so it's effectively useless. We don't get enough call for DVD work to have it make sense to buy an expensive encoding solution -- I do maybe three or four custom DVD's a year, for corporate videos to be used at trade shows by clients. I'm trying to avoid paying $thousands for another solution, since TMPGEnc Plus creates terrific looking files if this one bug could just be fixed.

If anyone has dealt with the author of the quicktime plugin, or has any other suggestions, I'd be most grateful.

Pete

Can you not export Targa frame sequences from the Symphony?

>Can you not export Targa frame sequences from the Symphony?

Sure you can, but it's not practical: the export would be about 1MB per frame. At 30fps, a one-hour export would be 1.8GB per minute, or 108GB for a one-hour program. To say nothing of the export time. And the fact that the export is IN ADDITION TO the video already in the edit system, on the drives.

The way the Symphony is designed to work, when you "export" a Quicktime, the export is actually a little file -- about 100K -- that contains pointers into the video that's already inside the system. So if you have 150GB of video spread across four drives, you're not doubling that amount by copying it into another file; you're just exporting a reference to it. With four 70GB drives, I don't have enough storage to have video inside the edit system AND export a huge file like that.

And what's killing me is that it ALMOST works. TMPGEnc can read the file and does a beautiful job of MPEG2 encoding. But due to the fact that QTREADER doesn't accurately pass the frame rate, there's a hiccup every couple of minutes, and that's enough to make the file unusable, at least as something you could send to a client. (My DVD projects are typically edit projects that would normally be copied to VHS tapes, but if a client wants it to run endlessly in a kiosk at a trade show, they want a DVD because it can be programmed to loop over and over again). If QTREADER was a commercial program, I'm sure I could prevail on the manufacturer to fix it. But it seems that it was written by a reclusive author who doesn't want to support it.

Pete