Comments

MarkWWWW wrote on 10/16/2003, 7:33 AM
What ought to happen is that 3 files will be written to the directory where the .AVI is located - they have extensions .ssa, .sub, and .txt. The .txt file contains a list of the date/time codes associated with each frame of the video inthe .AVI file. (The other files contain this infromation in a form usable by a couple of other specific subtitling programs.)

However, the latest version (0.5) doesn't seem to work properly for me - I just get a file with a header and no actual date/time data. But the previous version (0.4) does work correctly as far as I can see.

Mark
filmy wrote on 10/16/2003, 8:57 AM
RIght, I get what is *supposed* to happen - it just is that nothing happens. From what I gather the new version doesn't work. (Just a P.S - I downloaded what was marked as version 4 but it comes up as versions 3. In any case - same thing. So I did some further testing - I tested a promo I edited with VV 3 last year and the file read fine. Not only that but it read all the source dates and time which means for the most part the orginal source materials date and time info is retained through a render. Now - as that worked I loaded up a 24p conversion from the exact same file, done in VV 4. Nothing happens. (In either version 3 or 5) So thinking it might be a 24p thing I loaded up a full 65 minute VV 4 24p render done in September - the first 2 minutes read ok in version 3. In Version 5 it seemed like the entire film was reading but upon checking only the first 10 minutes or so read and orginal source info was not retained. So it seems this is hit and miss - even the older viersions. When it works it seems to work best on shorter files/pieces. I can't get anything to read in Premiere captured or VV captured files. With VV *rendered* files it works and reads the info from source files captured in Premiere as well as VV. VV rendered 24p files are hit and miss. The "run time" isn't always there and the date often comes up as the year "1900" in rendered files. So the DV_Date code is a great idea but doesn't always work it seems)

As a side note - All this talk about Sub Station Alpha but has it been discontinued? I found a "new" program called Medusa which seems to be a replacement for SSA. On the other hand I also found a program called Subtitle Workshop which is more detailed than SSA is. Now I bring this up because you can run scripts and I was wondering is there was a simple way to write a script for any of these programs that would 1> read the date/time from a file 2> simply add run time (like adding the TC window) as a file.
MarkWWWW wrote on 10/17/2003, 7:32 AM
> So the DV_Date code is a great idea but doesn't always work it seems

Yes, I'm afraid that seems to be the case. I get somewhat different results in detail from yours, presumably because we are using different avis (most of the ones I'm using were captured with Scenalyzer, I think), but it's not reliable for me either.

V.0.5 seems to fail on almost everything I try it on. (It did work on one attempt, but immediately afterwards attempting to read the exact same avi failed again and it has never succeeded since.)

V.0.4 (which says it is V.0.3) seems to almost always work on the test avis I've tried it on, but it does fail sometimes for no apparent reason - it will succeed with a file one minute and then five minutes later if you try the exact same avi it may fail.

I tried downloading the source files and the free lcc32win C compiler to see if i could get anywhere with it that way but I wasn't even able to get it to compile. (This may be entirely my fault though. I'm not really a programmer - certainly not a C programmer - and have only a sketchy idea of what's involved in compiling things from source code.)

I think I may try emailing the author about it once I've had a bit more time to determining exactly under what circumstances things go wrong and in what way.

Mark