SOT: How did I get mixed up in this?

farss wrote on 9/25/2009, 1:48 AM
There's a bit of controversy going on down under over an art gallery refusing to show a certain video. This piece was banned in 1970, one of those involved was arrested on his return from a German film festival as he was carrying "a banned movie". The the ban was lifted and you'd think that was the end of it.

Fast forward to a few weeks back.
Well no, the gallerie's director was concerned about the genteel folk who visit his gallery seeing full frontals of a pregnant woman so to appease the gallery we took that 1:21 movie out of the DVD. Now the media got hold of the story and all hell broke loose. So now the movie is back in.

So I open up the original Vegas project, most of the footage came off DVDs so not too quick to load. The artist's partner wanted to know the exact runtime and where it was in the rotation for a warning sign on the theatre door. That's when I realised due to a snaffu in how the DVD I'd pulled this from had been created most of the movie was missing, only 20 seconds made it, the most revealing bits were never seen by the gallery owner :)

Thanks to having that free copy of Womble I managed to restream the mpeg-2 and the movie is all back together. I'm just waiting to here what happens when the gallery owner gets to see some of the closeups that he didn't see first time around.

Link to media coverage here

Moral to this story. Although Vegas will import media from a DVD it might not be what's actually in the movie. I should have been more suspicious, the movie did have some wierd cuts in it but it was from old hand spliced 16mm so I just figured it was meant to be that way.

Just for the record VLC made the same mistake as Vegas, only a STB player and Womble got it right.

Bob.

Comments

johnmeyer wrote on 9/25/2009, 11:57 AM
I'll skip over the full-frontal part (although perhaps Vegas can't handle full frontal ..).

My reason for posting is to note that Vegas has actually gotten considerably worse over time in its ability to correctly handle MPEG-2 and VOB files. Version 8.0c is IMHO non compos mentis in dealing with these files, often truncating, glitching, getting audio out of sync, etc. Vegas 7.0d handles them much better.

The one thing 8.0c does better than 7.0d is loading times. So, if the files WILL play, and you've got a LOT of VOB or MPEG-2 files, then 8.0c is better, although the playback speed on the timeline may be slower.

The main problem, from the very beginning, is that Sonic Foundry decided to license, rather than build, their MPEG-2 technology. By contrast, they built their own DV codec, and of course it is the best in the business. At the time, MPEG-2 probably just seemed like yet another codec. However, as I told them seven years ago, people are going to want to edit their DVDs because not everyone will always have access to the original tapes and project files.

It is good that you have Womble. Hopefully you also have the amazingly useful (but hard to find) utility that takes a Vegas EDL text file and immediately turns it into a Womble project file. This lets you edit in Vegas and then let Womble do the cuts-only, lossless editing. Yes, I know that we can sometimes do no-recompress editing in Vegas 8.x and 9.x, but it is extremely touchy, and it definitely will not let you do seamless cuts of MPEG-2 files that were encoded at different bitrates.


farss wrote on 9/25/2009, 1:44 PM
"perhaps Vegas can't handle full frontal "

I can vouch for Vegas being absolutely content agnostic.


What seems to have gone wrong with this VOB in both Vegas and other apps is they are reading information in the file header or some such and from that determining the length of the video. When I first drop the file onto the V8 T/L the thumbnails show all the frames however as I'd playout the video they'd change and what was shown in the thumbnails did not appear in the preview window.
On the other hand Womble would seem to actually read / count the frames to determine the length of the video. Rendering the video out of Womble as mpeg-2 was almost instantaneous, file size remained the same and I'd guess it wrote the correct data into the header and from that Vegas etc would then get it right.
I'm not certain that this problem would be resolved by using a different decoder. Vegas seemed to be trying to fit X frames of source into Y frames on the T/L and making a mess of it. Possibly I might have avoided this problem by doing an Import Camcorder Disk rather then simply dragging the file onto the T/L. I have found that this mechanism works much better in V8 and V9 than previous versions which would drop a few frames where vision spanned a VOB.

Bob.
Laurence wrote on 9/25/2009, 1:50 PM
It is good that you have Womble. Hopefully you also have the amazingly useful (but hard to find) utility that takes a Vegas EDL text file and immediately turns it into a Womble project file. This lets you edit in Vegas and then let Womble do the cuts-only, lossless editing. Yes, I know that we can sometimes do no-recompress editing in Vegas 8.x and 9.x, but it is extremely touchy, and it definitely will not let you do seamless cuts of MPEG-2 files that were encoded at different bitrates.

If I use this tool, render in Womble, then try to use the Womble edited mpeg2 in Vegas, it doesn't work anymore. It used to work in older versions of Vegas, but I can't get it to in Vegas 8 or 9. I think it's because of the smart-rendered audio (the reason I wanted to use Womble), but I'm not sure.

By the way, the Vegas EDL to Womble tool is http://www.womble.com/tools/edl2wbp.ziphere.[/link]
johnmeyer wrote on 9/25/2009, 5:55 PM
Thanks for the link to the Vegas->Womble EDL tool. I'd lost that link.

Another thing that helps in dealing with VOB files that I just found when I used that free download day at Womble to get the latest version, and that is the MBS file. If you just put VOB files on the Womble timeline, sometimes even Womble glitches at the transition between the VOB files (missing frames of video, and audio dropouts). However, if you create an MBS file -- which is just a text file with the names of the VOB files and a header -- somehow Womble doesn't have that problem. Why Womble can't do this without the text file, I don't know. This has saved me from having to use DVD Decrypter or Shrink to combine the VOB files into one file. This was often an extra step when all I wanted was one or two VOB files.