I have a strange problem that has occurred with TMPGEnc and the Premier Pro media encoder. I have a video that contains a few shots that have very bright reflections on either plates or silverware. The video is fine when the original AVI file is viewed. After being converted to MPEG the bright spots have a flickering star-like effect for a few seconds just as the scence appears. I've tried a number of settings in TMPGEnc based upon tips I've found but I can't seem to removed this flickers. I wonder if the reflections are so bright that after being encoded to MPEG they are causing a problem?

Any ideas on what I can do to resolve this? I could probably cut out a 4 - 10 second slice of the video to show what I mean if that would be helpful.

The Flickering could Just be Artifacts from Interlaceing, in which case they would only be Viewable on your PC Monitor which isn"t meant to display Interlaced material were your TV set is ,I have a TV out Card hooked up to a 13 inch TV set so I can See what the Video will look like when Displayed on a Interlaced TV and Most Interlace artifacts totally disapear when Played on TV....You can try encodeing the Part in question and use the Deinterlace Filter and if the Problem disapears then you Know it was from being Interlaced and you won"t have to worry about it.......

After reading your message I decided to do a bit of checking by viewing the output through my external TV which is connected via my camera which is connected via firewire. As it turns out the original footage played from the timeline has the problem as well. I certainly feel like a blockhead (add to that my inability to correctly spell the words on my subject line (:<)). I can't tell you how much time I wasted thinking the problem popped up once the sequence was converted to MPEG.

Thanks for your reply since that nudged me back to looking at the source material. Lesson learned, make sure you know your source material, even the insignificant portions....

I was not sure what fourm to put this under since it has sort of lots of problems in 1. If not just move it to the right fourm and tell me.


Ok I have these .mkv files and since I could not find no one to help me change them to svcd file I gave up on them(if you know how feel free to tell me) and decided to covert them with too .ogm files.
Heres what I did.

I used this guide to try to help me with this so you can see were I got this stuff from:
http://www.dvdrhelp.com/forum/userguides/170944.php


I used VirtualDubMod to covert them to ogm files. Works good about the same size. So the quality is about the same.

I took the .ogm and used VirtualDubMod again and took out the audio and saved it as a Demux what makes it as a .ogg file. I have 2 audio file but I am not sure why I would need to put both in at the end since I want only the English.

Then I took it and I used a program called goldwave to covert the .ogg to a wav file.

Then I went to and used this program to convert it called EaseAudioConverter to convert it too a mp2 file. I tried this HeadAC3he but it never worked for me I got some weird error.


Then I took it and used TMPGEnc to try to put it together the sound and the avi(what I got by just taking my virtual dub and getting the video did not know what they ment by chaning the file estention). But I get an error when I do that.(I am on step 3 of that guide I put up their)
Here is a picture of the error.

[img]http://www.angelfire.com/ab7/howser/dll_error.JPG[/img]


I have that file by that why what is says it is unable to load.

In case your wondering I need it too be scvd since my player plays that format. I hope someone can help me been trying for days now.

Also tell me step by step I am a noob as this. This is my first time trying to burn something to a cd. Let alone one of these 2 formats.

This is anmie too by the way. Also tell me if you want me to post more screenshot up about something and I will.

Ps. I hope someone helps me soon I am starting to think this can not be down.

Jaysus what a carry on?
You have just made things so much harder for yourself for no reason and it's took you about 5 steps and probably a lot of time to get nowhere when you could have accomplished this in one easy step.

All you needed to do was load the file into Virtualdubmod then start the frame server this will then create a small file in seconds which you just load into TMPG and encode as normal.

These are the steps you need to take to install and start the frame server.

1. From the Vitualdubmod folder run the file labeled 'Auxsetup.exe'

2. In the box that pops up select 'Install handler' then OK to all other boxes then 'Exit'

3. Now load your .mkv file into Virtualdubmod as normal

4. Select the audio track you require (I'm assuming you know how to do this)

5. Now click File>start frame server...

6. In the box that pops up click 'Start' then select a name and place to save the file and give it an .avi extension.
For example save it as MKV1.avi

7. DO NOT close the box that comes up. Next start TMPG and load the file you just created named MKV1.avi

8. Now just select the SVCD template or use the wizard and encode as normal .

As for your 'Can't load P3package.dll' error.
This is either because you have not downloaded TMPG correctly or you are trying to run TMPG from the .zip file or you do not have the TMPGenc.exe located in the same folder as the rest of the files it came with.

I searched and found several comments about DVDit's problems with GOP headers.

My problem is slightly different in that my files are already in MPEG2 format but apparently with headers that DVDit does not except.

Can anybody give me the details of what I need to do about converting the header configuration? I'm not sure at this point if I need to demux it and then reencode it with the proper settings or what.

Thanks in advance!

Are we talking about sequence headers?

Yes this is a Common thing with DVDit ,It needs a Sequence header before each GOP whch means before you encode your File go to "Settings" to "GOP" and set the "output Interval for Sequence Header" to "1" and now when you encode you will have a Sequence header before each GOP......

A newbie question. In terms of quality, which format is better? I hear that you can convert AVI to MPEG to reduce size while RETAIN quality, is it true?

avi andmpeg............i see it as what you are going to do with the file. avi are smaller than mpeg. some links for you..........

http://www.jmcgowan.com/avi.html

http://www.petesvideo.com/vidDVformats.htm

http://www.graphcomp.com/info/specs/ms/editmpeg.htm

hope this helps, these were found by copernic agent, case u were wondering where to get more info. dave

There are many types of AVI. AVI is just a container.

AVIs can be smaller then MPEGs (Divx and Xvid) and they can be bigger then MPEGs (DV and uncompressed).

The highest quality file of the above choices is uncompressed avi, but it takes up so much space it is only useful for capturing and not storage.

Xvid and Divx are based on mpeg-4 but in an AVI container. These can be small and high quality. For long term storage I would not use since they may not be around in five years. (yes it is possible to put xvid in a mpeg-4 container but this can be tricky and difficult for a person new to this)

For high quality and long term storage I would use MPEG-2.


Video Guy

A newbie question. In terms of quality, which format is better? I hear that you can convert AVI to MPEG to reduce size while RETAIN quality, is it true?

No, the opposite is true.

You can compress an MPEG to a smaller size AVI while maintaining similar quality.

Most compressed AVI's use MPEG4 which is a newer and better codec than MPEG 1/2 and allows much better compression and thus a better file size vs quality ratio.

Thanks! So for older game FMVs, AVI to MPEG is relatively save, right? The reason I'm asking this that I'm trying to make a CG from Final Fantasy 8. The problem is I only have the tools to convert Bink files (FF8 CG files) to AVI. And then I only have tools to edit MPEG. :( I know there probably are other tools out there, but I'm just too lazy to search. So if I don't lose too much quality by converting FF8 AVI to MPEG, then I can do my job.

Just use Virtualdub for editing AVI files. It's the best there is an also free.

Is there a way, hopefully with TMPGEncoder to say insert say black bars of some defined width along the top and bottom of the frame? Basically, the video does not fit the screen and I need to modify the video without affecting resolution and aspect. I was able to do this with yuvscale on *nix with a command similar to yuvscale -nn -MRATIO_720_640_460_480 -OSIZE_720x480.

What is the frame size of the video and what aspect ratio does it use?

Play about with the settings in the Clip Frame option

Yep you'll want to look at the Clip Frame settings. If you turn on the MASK checkboxes (left and right, in your case), it will replace whatever you are clipping out with a color "mask" (which defaults to black). I find this useful for replacing poor (or noisy) letterboxing in source video with fresh letterboxing. I have also read that clipping the frames can cause better video encoding quality because bitrate is not wasted on what is being clipped out.

Whatever you set up in here will probably also "interact" with the Video Arrange method, so depending on what you're trying to do, you'll probably need to experiment there some too, and don't forget about the Output Aspect Ratio. All 3 of these work together to give you what you have set.

I would set a subtitle on a avi movie - and I used this guide http://www.dvdrhelp.com/srtsubsvirtual.htm

But when I come to the point where TMPGenc opens the vdr file - TMPGenc crashes!
In the send report error log - Modname: ole32.dll and a lot of other informations

Have you disabled the "direct Show File Reader" in the Vfapi Plugins"???You need to do this sometimes to get Tmpgenc to load VDR Files.....

If you have no sound in your mpeg output and your file is not encoded with ac3 sound. Just goto option, enviromental setting, then vfapi plugin and set direct show filter to a higher priorty like 1. I know most people know this but I haven't used tmpgenc in a long time and I forgot. So I just thought this might help some new people.

Excellent....im new and i didnt know that so thank you because you just taught me something new. Please dont hesatate to post your tips cause us newbeeeeeeez love ya for it. Dave

No problem dave glad to help.

It would be nice to have the ability to either fade to black or simply add a certain number of seconds of black to the beginning and end of edited clips to give a more professional look to compilations of clips....when authoring discs with many clips there is often a delay between clips, this would make that less apparent.

Hope to see this in a future version of my favorite encoder!
Thanks for the great work and the time involved to bring it to us.

Justin

Interesting problem. Installed early version. Now when I try to upgrade with later version, cannot locate TMPGEnc DVD Author 1.5.msi to remove older version, leaving no option but to abort install. Is this a registry edit. Operating system is XP Home.

Hi,
I have my system set up with a box to the internet running win2k server with terminal services (well firewalled) I leave this box on mostly whilst my other XP machine just goes on when I need to line something up to download.. anyhow ...
I'd really like to use my win2k machine to tmpgenc some avi files, but one of the restrictions of terminal services is that the audio device is disabled, so when I start a TS session and try and encode all I can get is the Video.

I was really just wondering why TMPGenc relies on an audio card being present when all it is really doing reading a file and writing a file and not using sound (well not in the encoding).

Is it possible that I could modify tmpgenc so it doesnt rely on my disabled sound card ? All the audio codecs I need are installed its just the TS's thats disabling the soundcard..


Any help would be much appreciated.

Best wishes.

Barrie

This has nothing to do with the audio being disabled by the server or even TMPG relying on the sound card.

Your problem is that you do NOT have the correct codec installed to decode the audio in the AVI. Find out what the audio is in the AVI. If it's ac3 you will need the Ac3ACM decompresser installed or extract the Audio to a wav with Virtualdub _ac3 or virtualdubmod. If it is VBR mp3 then extract it to a wav with Virtualdub.

hmm, I thought I had already stated that I had all the codecs installed ... how do I know this ? .. well I guess I have to be very specific since you dont believe me..... If I log on locally on my terminal server machine and play the video I get sound ok.
Barrie.

>hmm, I thought I had already stated that I had all the codecs installed ... how do I know this ?

Yes and you seem to misunderstand me also and the way TMPG works, so lets not get sarcy.

Don't expect TMPG to be able to use the same codecs that media players can use. TMPG will only work with certain ones especially Ac3 codecs.
TMPG doesn't like certain Directshow codecs. This one is VFW compatible codec which TMPG prefers.

Just because you can play it in your media player it doesn't mean TMPG can decode it.

So lets start again shall we?
Find out what type of audio you have in your AVI by using a program such as Virtualdubmod or Virtualdub_ac3 or something like Gspot then if it Ac3, download the afore mentioned codec and install it.
You should then have audio.

If you don't want to take the advice of someone who has given the same sound advice to many others and solved their problem then don't bother asking again.

I can assure you Iam no idiot and am well versed enough with TMPG to know what I'm talking about

Oooops, sorry for my sarcastic tone, but you sounded very condescending.. anyhow It appears that you were right: I've tried a few other videos and found that some audio will show and some not regardless of Terminal services my the problem video for me had Windows Media Audio V2 codec and maybe that hasnt been installed .. anyhow thanks for your help in making me look again.. Barrie.

It would be nice to have the ability to either fade to black or simply add a certain number of seconds of black to the beginning and end of edited clips to give a more professional look to compilations of clips....when authoring discs with many clips there is often a delay between clips, this would make that less apparent.

Hope to see this in a future version of my favorite encoder!
Thanks for the great work and the time involved to bring it to us.

Justin

yes that would be excellent..................... dave