I have a number of short avi's taken by a digital camera. I need to join them together, but also have to replace the audio streams in each one. The audio I'm adding is just song tracks which I want to fade in and out at the start and end of each clip. The problem is the clips have different frame rates and some were taken at a different resolution. They also need some filtering to clean up contrast. My question is, how and what order should I do all the editing to keep best quality?

So far I've tried this--

A) For each clip:
1. Demux to audio and video.
2. Create an audio track with same length as the original, and do the fade at start and end.
3. Combine audio and video with VirtualDub in Direct Stream mode.
4. Open resulting file in VirtualDub. Set up for filtering, frame rate adjust etc, and frameserve to TMPGEnc to obtain the final format.

B) Finally, join resulting clips together.


This seems to work ok. But eventually the final video will end up on dvd. For step 4 I chose a resolution as good as the best quality avi clip, rather than the final dvd format, to keep down processing time. I was also setting TMPGEnc to output an mpeg system stream, as it seemed the easiest to join.

Will this cause a loss of quality when I get around to converting (upsampling) it to DVD format? This will probably be done by TMPGEnc.

Also, when frameserving to TMPGEnc from virtualdub, is it better to set the required frame rate and resolution in vdub, or allow TMPGEnc to handle it?

Thanks,
Dave