50 seconds to blackness

unclenoah wrote on 11/25/2002, 10:55 PM
i'm running a PII450 w/ 384 mb RAM, Win2k, ATI All-In-Wonder 7500, VF2.0

I recorded in a mpeg2 of a tv show i had on tape using another capture program. i import this into VF and then proceed to edit out the commercials (i hope the networks aren't reading this). my goal is to render down a MPEG1 that i can burn to VCD and watch later. the editing goes great, everything looks good on preview. i tell VF to render this down as a MPEG-1, NTSC VCD format and the render goes south at 50 seconds in. every single time. the video just goes black. the audio persists, though. i've checked and rechecked the source material to make sure i didn't do something funky while editing, and everything's fine. but every time i try to render this down, no matter what method i use, the video goes to black at 50 seconds, on the dot.

i also tried to do the render in Vegas Video 3.0 just to see if the same thing would happen, and sure enough it did.

i thought maybe it was my anti-virus software interfering, so i turned that off, but it still happened. i then went about shutting down every possible process, applicaiton and function aside from Video Factory and tried to do the render, but the same problem happened again.

i've produced other movies using this software (training vids for work) and not had this problem.

anyone have any ideas on this?

Comments

laz1 wrote on 11/27/2002, 5:28 AM
What was the other software prog you used and in what file format did it capture?
unclenoah wrote on 11/27/2002, 12:01 PM
I did the capture using the ATI TV software and captured in MPEG-2 format
ralphied wrote on 11/27/2002, 12:27 PM
My experience has been, anything can happen when you work with non-DV format files in VF (or any other video editing software for that matter.) I have an ATI A-I-W card too. I've tried editing MPEG-2 files in VF, and, invariably, something always went wrong. Most of the time, I would loose audio. But, occasionally, I would also loose video.

My solution was to get a Canopus ADVC-50 card. Produces DV .AVI files of excellent quality. (Downside is that the files are significantly larger -- about 5 times larger than MPEG-2 files.) Have yet to run into a glitch with VF, though.
unclenoah wrote on 11/27/2002, 6:21 PM
solid tip! thanks! -- does anyone know of a large-sized file converter that i could run my raw MPEG2 though to get it into a compliant DV AVI format?

another option, of course, would be just to capture the initial file as DV AVI -- but that brings up another problem. When I use VC to grab stuff, it always hits the AVI filesize limit right there in that magic ~7 minute spot -- this can make for some relatively frustrating grapping when i'm working with a ~1hour source -- is there any way to get VC to ignore the AVI filesize limitation, or am i stuck to dealing with 4-7minute clips and lots of editing?

thanks!
ralphied wrote on 11/27/2002, 11:22 PM
Wow! I'm really confused by the "7 minute AVI file size limit" you're referring to especially since you note in your original posting that you're running Win2k. I've captured videos over an hour long in one setting using VC without any "file size limit" problems. You definitely don't have to live with 7 minute max captures.

unclenoah wrote on 11/29/2002, 1:53 AM
Yeah, I have the file size limit problem with VC all the time -- that's the reason i decided to capture this piece as MPEG2 through the ATI capture utility in the first place...

is there some setting in VC where you disable the filesize limit or something? i've hunted for it hoping ot find it, but never have. :/
Chienworks wrote on 11/29/2002, 9:12 AM
Well, there really isn't a time limit setting in VidCap. There is a limit to the size of the file, and depending on the settings you use when capturing that will limit the amount of time that can be recorded. In VidCap go to Options / Preferences / Disk Management and look for Maximum DV clip size. Normally this is unchecked for NTSF systems (Windows 2K & XP), and checked for FAT32 systems (98SE & ME). When checked, the default is around 4000MB to comply with the 4GB file size limitation of FAT32. You can set this value for whatever you want, or ignore it completely, as long as you don't go over 4GB on FAT32.

If you are capturing DV, then 4GB holds about 18.5 minutes or so. If you're capturing uncompressed full screen AVI from analog, then 4GB lasts about 3.7 minutes. I'm guessing you were capturing to some slightly compressed coded that ended up with around 7 minutes for 4GB.

You can, of course, capture to mulitple files and end up with as many 7 minute files as your project lasts. If you're capturing in DV this will happen automatically. If not, you'll have to rewind the tape a bit and start capturing again manually, then edit the files together on the timeline.