Batch rerender DVD clips?

DataMeister wrote on 11/5/2006, 4:04 PM

I have captured a whole bunch of clips (100 or so) from DVD (ripped basicly) to the mpg files. But this particular system is a AMD 2000+ which can barely decode and play a single mpg clip at real time.

Does anyone know of an easy batch process way of rerendering each of these mpg clips over to a DV avi file that will be less processor intensive in the timeline? And is there something better than DV? Other than uncompressed which then becomes a hard drive problem.

Comments

[r]Evolution wrote on 11/5/2006, 4:19 PM

You could place the files you have on your Vegas timeline... Create REGIONS around each of them... then Render the Regions to .AVI with DV compression.

This maybe something you could do overnight. That way it can do its thing overnight then while you're at work the next day.

TheHappyFriar wrote on 11/5/2006, 5:36 PM

i believe tmpgenc would be faster with this. If you haven't used it before you should get a free several day trial that will allow you to do what you want (i liked it so much i bought it)

but you're wrong on the playback. my amd 1800 ran mpeg-2 clips just fine. :)

bStro wrote on 11/5/2006, 6:53 PM

Google around for and download VirtualDub-Mod. Vegas is not the right tool for what you want to do.

Rob

farss wrote on 11/5/2006, 8:32 PM

With the Veggie Toolkit, batch renders are a breeze.

bStro wrote on 11/9/2006, 10:43 AM

Yes, but he's working from MPEG files. Batch render or no, I think it would be best to use something more MPEG-friendly.

Rob

farss wrote on 11/9/2006, 11:10 AM

I understand that but he's rendering to AVI. The only issue I can see is the quality of the mpeg-2 decoder. If there's a better decoder available for VD than Vegas I'm all ears. Apart from that the batch render tool in the Veggie Toolkit makes this a breeze, you don't even need to create project files, just tell it to render all the clips in a folder to another folder, it'll drive Vegas for you. I use this feature quite a bit for converting .wav files to .pca files for archiving, I'd imagine .mpg. to .avi to go just as smoothly.

Regarding the output .avi, the Sony YUV codec should be better for the task than the DV codec, it's still a disk hog but not as bad as uncompressed.

Bob.

Laurence wrote on 11/9/2006, 11:41 AM

I dealt with this exact situation not too long ago and came up with what I believe is the best solution. I just changed all the .mpg extensions to .m2t and rendered proxies for editing. When I rendered I "shifted gears" back to the original mpegs (m2ts). The result was smooth editing and only one generation of rendering all the way to the new DVD.

bStro wrote on 11/9/2006, 6:30 PM

The other issue, Bob, is speed. TMPGEnc and VirtualDub-Mod are optimized for reading and decoding MPEG2 files. Vegas, not so much. I've done my share of saving MPEG2 to AVI using all three programs, and Vegas could not compete in that arena in my experience.

Given how compressed his source files are, I imagine that the difference between DV AVI output and Sony YUV AVI output would be neglible as far as quality is concerned, so he may as well go with the faster option.

Rob

farss wrote on 11/9/2006, 6:58 PM

I have a copy of TMPGEnc, didn't know it'd render to AVI, obviously not using the Vegas codec. Still if you're batch rendering speed normally isn't so much of an issue, I just queue these jobs up while I sleep or work on something else.

The compression thing, I agree about, my concern is going from 4:2:0->4:1:1->4:2:0 assuming this is being done in NTSC land. In PAL land it doesn't seem to be much of an issue, in NTSC I don't know.