Music guy going video - need advice from you pros!

plyall wrote on 7/9/2003, 4:52 PM
Folks -

I have been a musician/midiot/audio recording geek for some time now. I just recently built up a system to do some video editing on, and I'm looking for software recomendations from you seasoned vets.

The machine I built/ordered has a P4 @ 2.4 Ghz, 1G DDR333 memory, 480G storage, built in USB 2.0 and Firewire, and is running on SIS648 (L4S8A2) motherboard. For graphics, I chose the ATI All In Wonder 9700.

The video card shipped with a version of Pinnacle Studio, which was entertaining for a bit. but I think I need something more.

First off - the big question:

Have been wanting to transfer some of my old Pink Floyd LaserDiscs to DVD for sometime. I used the video capture and built in ATI media tools to capture the laserdisk to an MPEG2 file that runs for about 1:40:00.

When moving around in this file using several editing/authoring tools (Pinnacle, Sonic MYDVD, DVD Architect, etc.) I have noticed that the machine just seems to lock up for what is sometimes several minutes. It will eventually come back if I have enough patience, but sometimes it just appers hung. Is this normal? Is there some video processing/indexing/rendering going on that causes this horrible pause? Running with a machine this beefy, I wouldn't have expected this.

If it is just a matter of horsepower, would I be better off going to a hardware accelerated package (like the Pinnacle Pro-One RTDV)? That's probably herasy around here, but I thought I'd ask. Scanning the forum, it appears that not everyone thinks that the Adobe Premier product is top shelf...

I did/am trying the Vegas demo now and while I really like the flow of the program (it feels much like some of the music/audio editing tools I already own), I have seem similar lock-up like behavior with Vegas (minutes of 'not responding' folowed by a magical reappearance of control). Surely this can't be the norm?

I'm asking for help in choosing software (or software/hardware) because I have been burned in the past buying expensive software that either never fully matures, or never gets all of the promised features.

BTW - being a audio guy with the ability to record in surround, the AC-3 encoder is also of tremendous interest to me. It appeared that several folks were having issues with it over in the AC-3 forum. What's the consensus - is it a worthy and stable offering?

Thanks for any and all help and suggestions!

Pete

Comments

MUTTLEY wrote on 7/9/2003, 5:20 PM
Seeing as your system is more stout than mine and that I have never experienced the problems you seem to be having I'd hafta say, no, that's not normal ( or acceptable ). What is it ? Well that's the million dollar question. I've had Vegas crash on me quite a few times till I finally figured out ( more by chance than skill ) that it was the USB 2.0 driver that I had. What the conflict was God only knows. I wasn't even using anything ( that I'm aware of ) that was USB at the time of the crashes.

If I were you I'd first check and make sure you don't have any IRQ conflicts. Update all your drivers. Uninstall and delete anything and everything that you don't use.

Hope one of those gets ya on the right track. =)

- Ray

ray@undergroundplanet.com
www.undergroundplanet.com
plyall wrote on 7/9/2003, 5:26 PM
Well - in doing some research, it seems that most of the time is being spent in disk I/O.

I fired up PERFMON (running windows XP Pro), and saw that I was pegging the disk meters. I checked the machine physically and noted that this was true.

Is there something about MPEG files? Does the application have to read the whole file to determine positioning information? Is there embedded timecode that can be used to seek to a location on the file, or must it all be processed serially? Would I be better off capturing to AVI files - are they any easier for editors to digest?

Bewildered at the moment...

and thanks!

Pete
Chienworks wrote on 7/9/2003, 5:29 PM
Your slowness problem is due to the enormous MPEG file you're trying to work with. MPEG uses temporal compression, which means that most of the frames aren't complete images, but depend on data from previous frames. Therefore, when the software needs to display an arbitrary frame, it may have to gather data from a much larger part of the file and this can take a lot of time.

If you capture to AVI your editing will go much smoother since each frame will be complete by itself. You'll probably also get better quality. Since you're capturing with the ATI card you'll probably be getting uncompressed .avi files at around 1.7GB/minute, but with 480GB of drive space you've got plenty of room.
plyall wrote on 7/9/2003, 6:48 PM
OMG - I think you've nailed it!

I tried some hour long camcorder (DV) files that I had imported as AVI using my firewire port, and they were easy and fast to edit!

On the ATI video capture, I have setup a recording preset to do AVI recording at 720x480, 29.97 frame rate, and 48Khz stereo at 16 bit. Should this do the trick?

Also - should I allow the preset to do de-interlacing? Lastly - it appears there's a variety of CODECs to select from. The currently selected ones are:

Video: UYVY video format (native)
Audio: 48Khz, 16 bit, stereo, PCM, native

Thanks folks - you are really digging me out!

I may have to re-capture the laserdiscs into AVI format to get a better handle on editing them.

Pete
plyall wrote on 7/9/2003, 6:52 PM
One more question - am I losing anything (resolution, content) by capturing to AVI?
craftech wrote on 7/9/2003, 8:25 PM
No you shouldn't lose anything. When you create the DVD's the video should look the same if you do it correctly as DVD is "slightly" better looking than Laserdisc.
Audio quality of Laserdisc is equal to DVD so your audio should work well if you capture it as a seperate stream from the video.
TheHappyFriar wrote on 7/9/2003, 9:38 PM
You might just want to capture your laserdisk's to DVD MPEG-2 with the ATI. That would save you time rendering (and lots of time at that!). Also, the uncompressed AVI's won't be to fast to access eigther (faster then Mpeg though.). The computer will contantly read the disk for the info. I capture with my el-cheapo analog capture card with the Huffy codec, then convert to NTSC DV if I plan to do a lot of editing. If you can (and you want to edit your laser disk footage) you should use an Analog-DV converter and capture your laserdisks as DV.

plyall wrote on 7/9/2003, 11:06 PM
I did a trial (re)capture of the first side of the laserdisk using an AVI target format and editing was MUCH quicker! The only problem was that for one hour of video, I ran up a pretty expensive storage bill (I think it was around 68G - is that possible?)...

I can't say for sure right now, as I wiped the disk so that I could use the 2 200G dives as a dynamic volume that is striped - incredible throughput (>50MB/sec).

What resolution/parameters should I be using for the AVI capture to get a great picture & audio without going too bonkers on storage?

Pete
TheHappyFriar wrote on 7/9/2003, 11:13 PM
If you plan to use it for DVD, have your video res eigther 720x480 or 640x480. I think the ATI might be able to capture the 720x480 but if you use analog input it will put black bars on the sides. But, with unconpressed AVI, you're going to have high storage anyway. If you want I can send you a copy of the huffy codec. e-mail me at elsysop<at>localnet<dot>com and i'll send you a copy. That will cut your storage by about 1/2 to 1/3.