Rendering a .wmv file

Peyton wrote on 11/27/2003, 1:02 PM

I'm having weird problems with a .wmv file, rendering it to mpg format. It's five minutes long, yet took over an hour to render. The resulting mpg plays the sound OK, but the pictures flashes a few seconds, then goes away.

What's going on, and how do I get by it? Is it a framerate thing?

Comments

kameronj wrote on 11/27/2003, 1:31 PM

It's the media.

It may help if you render it to an AVI first...then check the AVI file to see if it is okay - then render that to MPEG.

That may help.

Laurence wrote on 11/27/2003, 10:36 PM

Lately I just render to an avi file first before I do any kind of compression. I'd rather not have to because of the extra hard drive space required, but it seems to be neccessary.

Laurence Kingston

RBartlett wrote on 11/28/2003, 3:10 AM

Using WMEncoder (free at M$) to make a new WMV, perhaps uncompressed WMV, can help make up for the lack of keyframes or indexing in a web target WMV. Then edit that in Vegas. If you don't follow the WMEncoder wizard, you can set a new bitrate that might help preserve quality or uncompressed WMV, honest!

If it isn't uncompressed or consumer DV, I find black frames or the Sony application just disappears on me. Even MPEG-2 rendering does that sometimes with DV or uncompressed sources.

I say this, but it is just about the only hoop jump I have to take into account with Vegas, and more disc space and a slight quality hit is all I suffer if I bring in WMV or PICvideo MJPEG through such a less direct route.

Peyton wrote on 11/28/2003, 6:37 AM

Good ideas all around. Yesterday, I tried rendeing from wmv to avi. From an 8 meg wmv file, it created a 1.4 GB avi that still had flashing frames and then no picture (black.)

I'll try the MS WMV program, that sounds like a good plan. If that fails, I'll recontact the Navy guy who told me where to download this thing.

If anyone's curious what wmv I'm messing with, it's that Marine Corps/Navy movie about Operation Iraqi Freedom. Our daughter wants to be able to show it to her friends on the TV. Aren't I a good daddy? I could be playing Lock On: Modern Air Combat. :)

You mean Windows Movie Maker? I found that to be the only reference to any sort of encoder, when I serched MS downloads. Ah, here we go. Searching the Knowledge Base for WMV yielded Windows Media Encoder 9. It claims to be for professionals, it might do. Movie Maker is for grandmas trying to get their baby movies onto a CD, or at least that's my impression. I'll let you know about my progress or lack of it.

Cheers,
Peyton