Anyone had any success editing footage from DSR DVD200

farss wrote on 4/7/2004, 7:54 PM

I've tried every piece of software and tricks to try to edit the footage these cameras record to DVD with no luck. The vision isn't a problem, just rename the .VOB to mpg and Vegas and many other things will edit it.
The audio is another issue, the camera records that as .ac3 (shudder). So here's what I've tried to handle that:
Strip the audio out as an ac3 file and run that through BeSweet. Result, roughly 3 seconds of audio.
Use various DVD authoring apps to just join the muxed mpeg files. Result, DVD that only has 3 seconds of audio.
Get trial version of ULead MediaStudio Pro.
Looks promising, dropped mpeg file into that and yes, it'll edit the original vision and ac3 audio EXCEPT again the audio pegs out at 3 seconds.

Now we know the audio is there, it plays OK in most DVD players, MediaStudio says the audio track is all there. The extracted ac3 file is the right size so again I know there's 15 minutes of audio in it.

I know this camera wasn't really designed with editing the video in mind and we don't need to do anything tricky with it. What we would like to do is something as simple as join clips together and put all of them onto a 12cm DVD. Even with a VHS-C camera you could copy multiple camera tapes onto one VHS tape and reuse your expensive camera tapes.

Comments

ScottW wrote on 4/7/2004, 7:59 PM

How about just throwing the DVD in a player that will play it and capturing the audio using Vegas and a sound card? Kinda crude, and you have to sync the audio up manually, but it gets the job done.

farss wrote on 4/7/2004, 8:46 PM

We could go one better than that, we have a player that'll play it out as DV25 via firewire BUT that means another set of compression which we were trying to avoid.

RexA wrote on 4/8/2004, 12:15 AM

I don't know if it might work any better, but I have used a free tool to convert AC3 files to wav. It's called "AC3Tool by Ciler". Info says it's actually a GUI for Azid, Lame, vStrip. As I recall, I found it with a google search and the download package had all of the package (not just the GUI program.)

Like I say, don't know if it will work any better than what you have tried but it was free. If I'm looking at the right download file, it was about 1 GB.

farss wrote on 4/8/2004, 6:11 AM

I think it's basically the same as the one I've tried. Just a different wrapper for the same set of code.
Like I said I've tried most of the free stuff out there and several that cost as well. They all hit exactly the same problem. Mystery is what's inside the ac3 stream that makes it go wrong, why are Sony selling a camera that records this way.
I recalled several months ago someone here had success with ULead MSP 7 and the same camera, which is why as a desperate last measure I gave it a go. Now Just today I had a horrible thought, he was using the NTSC version of the camera, I know that for a fact as Sony have only very recently relased the PAL version of this camera. Possibly, and this could be a long shot, Sony have got some wierd bug in the PAL version.
I know this isn't really an issue for this forum but who the heck to talk to in Sony's consummer divisions that I'm likely to get an intelligent answer from?

JohnnyRoy wrote on 4/8/2004, 10:52 AM

I’ve had good success with AC3 Decode with reading back DVD’s I’ve burned with DVDA. You might want to give it a try.

~jr

RexA wrote on 4/8/2004, 12:30 PM

> I know this isn't really an issue for this forum but who the heck to talk to in Sony's consummer divisions that I'm likely to get an intelligent answer from?

A couple weeks back, Jsnkc posted a link for subscribing to the DVDList email reflector, in this thread
The Other Thread

They seem to have a lot of members who are very knowledgable about the details of DVD encoding. Maybe someone there could shed some light on what is causing the problem.

Be warned, the list is very active, so it will generate a lot of email if you subscribe.

MarkWWW wrote on 4/8/2004, 2:47 PM

I've never attempted to extract audio from one of these DVD cams so I don't know if this suggestion will help in your case, but when dealing with AC3 files extracted from a variety of other sources I've sometimes found that there can be errors and/or extraneous data in the AC3 file which confuse software decoders (though strangely hardware decoders will usually decode the file OK).

In these cases I've found that a little command-line utility called AC3Fix.exe will solve the problem - it scans the AC3 file and corrects any bad blocks it finds, outputting a new version of the file which will be accepted by a software decoder without problems.

You can download AC3Fix.exe, along with a nice little GUI to make it easier to use, from http://www.roderz.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/ac3/

Hope it solves the problem in your case.

Mark

farss wrote on 4/8/2004, 4:16 PM

Mark,
I just downladed it and I'll try it later today. The symptoms you describe are exactly what I'm seeing. On the original camera DVD, on those STB player that will play it the audio is fine but drops out on PowerDVD on the PC at exactly the same point that everything else stops seeing the audio.
Thanks in anticipation, even if it doesn't fix the problem I've now got a logical explanation of WHY it might be going wrong.