VideoStudio 7 Processing Time

[CletusVanDamm]

I am new to video processing.
I am trying to make a video of my footballs team's highlights for the year.
I have about 50 minutes of HD (1080) video assembled in a VideoStudio 7 project.
I started the burn to DVD process.

it has been running for 8 hours and it says it is 8% complete.
It is not hung, I saw it go from 7% to 8%.

At this rate, it will take 50 hours to make a single DVD.

I must be doing something wrong.

This is running on a 64 bit win 7 home pro system with 4GB ram (using the 64 bit version of VideoStudio).

Any ideas?

[TreeTops]

What camera was the video from?

[LMotlow]

I'd repeat TreeTops' request: what camera was used? Where did the video come from? You've given no information about the original video other than it's 1080 HD. Interlaced? Progressive? What frame rate? Some cameras shoot HD as 1080p or as 1080i at different frame rates.

You can't burn 1080-line HD to the DVD format. You can burn some varieties of AVCHD to DVD disc, but it won't be "DVD" and a DVD player won't play it.

By the way, welcome to the forum.

[pepegot1]

Try this site for VS help http://phpbb.ulead.com.tw/EN/viewforum.php?f=1

[CletusVanDamm]

The original files were AVCHD from a Sony Handy Cam.
I took the clips from each game (.MTS) files and made a highlight video for the game using Windows Movie Maker. The output of that was .wmv files:

1920x1080
Data Rate 24000kbps
29 fps

Those .wmv files are about 1.6 GB for 10 minutes (each highlight film was about 10 minutes)

Right now I am trying to take 6 of those .wmv files and make a DVD. The 6 .wmv are about 55 minutes total time.

Video Studio has been running the burn phase for 19.5 hours (yes nineteen and a half hours) and reports 12% done.

Again, this is on a Win7 64 bit machine AMD dual core with 4GB RAM.

I am obviously doing something wrong. At this rate, it will take 156 hours (6.5 days) to burn this DVD.

[smrpix]

Really 29 fps or 29.97? Makes a difference. 29 may require blending every single frame.

And why did you use both Windows Movie Maker and VideoStudio? Either should be sufficient.

[Bjs]

The major question that needs answering ... hardware profile ?

We have no idea what your computer "system" setup is so your going to get a lot of guess work.

Hd editing generally needs a high end cpu, video down scaling lesser.

[LMotlow]

Just trying to get some clarification and put all of your info in one place. I do find a couple things that are big mistakes, but I find some of it confusing.

A dual core CPU for HD processing, whether it's AMD or not or whether it's 64-bit or not, is a bad idea. How bad is uncertain, since AMD made dozens of different versions of dual core CPU's. So we've got sketchy CPU information, as well as guessing about which of dozens of SONY HD cameras you have.

Most advanced members here would regard Windows Movie Maker as among the least desirable of video processing software. Not sure what you did with WMM except change containers from mts to wmv. Was there a reason for doing this? I thought you wanted DVD. Other than just changing containers, was there any resizing or re-encoding in WMM (I sure hope not). Resizing and/or re-encoding with WMM would be two mistakes.

When you quote the 1.6GB figure, do you mean that all 6 videos together sum to 1.6GB? Or are the videos 1.6GB each? I ask because 55 minutes of video at a total size of 1.6GB is low quality, especially for sports action, whether it's HD or standard definition DVD.

Does the 1.6GB figure refer to the HD version, or to the DVD version? You know that 1920x1080 can't be encoded as DVD. It would have to be resized to 720x480 and entirely re-encoded from whatever codec you used in your mts or wmv. If your original h264 AVCHD video was interlaced and was resized while still interlaced, you have a disaster on your hands. If the original mts video was not interlaced and was resized as-is and is being encoded as progressive MPEG2, you'll have motion problems on playback (DVD is usually interlaced). You probably also know that the original AVCHD in h264 encoding can't be used for DVD and must be re-encoded as MPEG2.

This processing and resizing of lossy encoded video and re-encoding from HD to SD is pretty rough for a 2-core CPU. What WMM and Corel are doing to it is anyone's guess. I could think of many stages where mistakes were made.

Why not stick with MovieStudio? It should be able to handle the whole project without WMM. You might want to break the job into multiple steps and save each step along the way rather than overload a CPU that's under-nourished for what you're doing.

[CletusVanDamm]

LMotlow, thanks for all the feedback.

Following your approach and putting all info in one place, what I did/doing was/is:

1. Recording football games with a Sony HDR-PJ230. I got the camera for free, so, I am not going to change that piece of hardware.
2. The camera is started/stopped for each play, so I have 70-100 5-20 second AVCHD files for each game.
3. The AVCHD files are 1920x1080 data rate=16107kbps 29 fps.
4. At first, I used WMM to make a highlight film for each game. Those movies were just a caption screen for each play (such as #29 50 Yard Touchdown) and then the AVCHD/.mts file of that play.
5. I tried to make these as MPEG4, but they would not play, not even on the machine that created them.
6. I then switched to wmv, still using WMM. Those would play. The .wmv are 1440x1080 datarate 24000kbps 29 fps
7. For the end of the season, I wanted a single DVD (or similar) of all the game highlight film.
8 Since i had each game as a single wmv, I tried to use Windows DVD Maker to turn them into a DVD. This worked, but it was always turned from 16x9 to 4x3 aspect ratio. I tried several times, always selecting 16x9, but it never worked correctly.
9. I then tried to combine all the .wmv into a single wmv with WMM. That worked, but the 50 minute video was 9GB.
10 I then tried to use VS to combine the wmv into a single file. That is what ran for 19 hours and was only 12% complete. I stopped that.

I am a football coach, all I want is an easy way to take those original AVCHD/.mts files and make simple single game and full season highlight videos with a simple caption screen for each play, that are in HD and can be distributed to the team.
I don't want to become a video processing guru

Any quick ideas on the best and easiest way to do that?

Thanks

[Brainiac]

1440x1080 is a 4:3 aspect ratio. Not a user of Windows DVD Maker but seems that's why it insists on keeping 4:3 aspect ratio.

Brainiac

[smrpix]

Any quick ideas on the best and easiest way to do that?

For right now, you can try authoring your current WMV clips to DVD with AVStoDVD. https://www.videohelp.com/tools/AVStoDVD

Going forward, Sony provides software with those cameras, and it is also available as a free download, that can easily trim, extract and combine the clips and burn them to disk. That's the easiest.

If you want to get a little more sophisticated, you can use Sony's Movie Studio. You'll want the platinum version which lists at $80 for the disk authoring/burning capabilities.

Sony has created a whole consumer-level ecosystem to deal with exactly the issues you are having. Some folks hate them for that, but it works pretty well.

[Bjs]

You dont need to be a guru but giving limited information about the system being used to encode the video is going to be a major issue in resolving the problem.

We need to know the cpu of the system in order to determine if the long time to complete encoding issue is either software or hardware problem ... software can be sorted but hardware can not unless one upgrades.

Even my old dual core 3.2 with vs 9 can knock 1.3h hd to dvd in less than 6 hours ... with minor tweaks.

[mike20021969]

I'm surprised VideoStudio 7 (from 2002) even supports HD.

[Brainiac]

I'm surprised VideoStudio 7 (from 2002) even supports HD.

Unless the op means X7.

Brainiac

[pepegot1]

Here is a good way to do it:
Render to desired format, mpg, (blu-ray change m2t to m2ts.) Then, use tsmuxer (does not accept m2t files) to get blu-ray folders and burn with Imgburn. Never a problem. I do not use VS burning or menu elements. Use Tmpgence authoring works for custom menus.- much better. This is not difficult once you get the habit. For mpg, I use TmpGenc DVD Author to make menus and burn with Imgburn. You will have a small learning curve but, t is worth it in the end. Help on the particulars can be asked of in this forum.

[mike20021969]

I do not use VS burning or menu elements.

I tried it once... just the once. Never again. Talk about slow.
You could've walked to the moon and back with a limp and it would still be burning the disc upon your return.

[newpball]

Are you trying to put a 1080 video on standard DVD format?
You can't do that, you need to downscale the 1080 to SD format and since you are only stitching the various scenes you might as well downscale right away.

Then, if the source is 16:9 you can encode anamophically for the best possible quality on the DVD.