cleaner 6 mpeg2 changing movie duration?

[cafin8d]

I know, I know, Cleaner sucks.

Allow me to give some background. I do a lot of DVD-R creation with encoding from MJPEG-MOV to MPEG2 to DVD-SP. In the past I've used Astarte MPack, but am looking for a good OSX software package. BitVice doesn't have a batch mode, and QT6 MPEG2 export isn't as good quality as MPack. I only briefly tried mpeg2enc and was unhappy with the quality of the encoded file, but there are sooo many settings, perhaps I need to fiddle more. I have not tried mediapipe yet.

So anyway, cleaner6 seems to do a nice job for mov->mpeg2, although as noted so often, it is slooowwww. Compared to Mpack, it produces a better looking file with a smaller filesize. But, I notice that large files (60 minutes long), once encoded, have 3-4 seconds less in the time of the video, making the audio out-of-sync over the course of the movie. (Meaning the source is 60 minutes, the MP2 audio file is 60 minutes, and the MPEG2 video file is 59minutes, 56 seconds.) Both the MOV and encode are at 29.97 and I wouldn't think that VBR/CBR, bitrate or GOP settings would have anything to do with this.

Anyone have an idea why this might be happening?

[Cornucopia]

cafin8d:
Sorry for the delay, computer with password was out of commission for a few.

Not sure if you realized this, but your source really isn't 60 minutes--it's a certain number of frames (video) or samples (audio).

Bear with my example: If you have 29.97 frames and they are supposed to be played back at 29.97 frames/second, then obviously their total duration will be 1 second. But, if these same number of frames play back at 30.00 frames/second, they will be playing too quickly and be over too soon. This is what is happening here. If you play 29.97-framed video at exactly 30 frames/second, and adding up the number of frames in a 60 minute (29.97-frame) movie, the run time is......59 minutes, 56 seconds!! (Don't try to figure out how there would be "partial frames though)

Audio doesn't usually have this problem, cuz unless you are doing sophisticated FILM-frame pulldown/pullup during post-production, you would only be dealing with either 48kHz (usually-DV, DVD) or 44.1kHz (usually-CD, VCD, SVCD). That's why there's a GROWING lag between the two.

Higher-end video systems understand the varieties of video framerates and timecode rates and usually don't have this problem. I'm actually quite surprised that Cleaner let that occur. I don't like it's MPEG2 quality much either, but I thought it was less buggy than that.

What to do?
#1-check and re-check your settings. That includes making sure that cleaners "guesstimate" of source and target framerates is correct to begin with.
#2-If the stock setting doesn't work, make your own custom setting.
#3-If #2 doesn't work, or you're already doing custom setting. You may have a corrupt installation of Cleaner. This HAS happened to me twice! For some reason, re-installation fixed it.
#4-Try the conversion on a different computer. Or a diff platform (Mac/PC).
#5-Skip cleaner and try Heuris MPpro, or a nice hardware converter. $$$
#6-Go back to your secret closet and do the conversion on a PC with TMPGEnc/CCE and just fib about "How good this pass of Cleaner worked" on your video.
#7-Do a sophisticated video Frame rate conversion of 29.97-->30.00fps, then it won't speed up the video, but you still won't have true 29.97fps on your MPEG2 (which is the spec for NTSC)

Let us know how it turns out.

Happy encoding,
Scott

[cafin8d]

Hi Scott, thanks for the reply.

I was aware of the 29.97->30.00fps variation, but most encoders I've used aside of cleaner seem to auto-resolve the discrepency, and I was surprised when cleaner didn't.

I played around with just about every setting I could find, to no avail, and eventually went back to using mpack. (My secret closet isn't a PC TMPGEnc but rather launching classic ;) And cleaner's guestimate of the source is very accurate,so I'm a bit at a loss.

I have not tried a reinstall, but will give it a go this evening. Other than that, I can just assume some odd bug with my setup. The cleaner support guys seem to have a long list of known bugs, but I dind't find this particular one among them. Ah well. Perhaps I'll give Heuris a looksee.

[Cornucopia]

Which version of Cleaner are you using?

I didn't realize you were OS-X (probably should look more at peoples' profiles). This might have something to do with it. I've never actually experienced that particular problem with Cleaner (used 3.x, 4.x, 5.x), but I rarely use cleaner for MPEG. I lean on my Win2k PC with hardware encoder and with TMPGEnc when quality is premium, and I use my Pioneer PVR-9000 DVD-Recorder when I want good Realtime encoding from composite video (along w/ realtime AC-3)--then I just rip the VOB's.

M.Pack (v3.51) is passable for MPEG2, but SUCKS for MPEG1--way too many blocks--the only thing good about M.Pack for MPEG1 is that it doesn't take anywhere near as long as Cleaner or Heuris and it is roughly equal to Toast's VCD Export IMHO.
BTW--If you ever do BlueBook Enhanced AudioCD's or PictureVCD's, you need to keep an old (v2.06?) copy of M.Pack around if only for the MPEG Still creation feature. There is a bug in v3.51 where it won't create them correctly, yet the old version is fine. You can tell simply by the filesizes. I was in touch with Astarte about this, but it never got resolved, and then Apple took it over and that was the end of that.

Good luck, and let us all know how the re-install turns out.

Scott

[cjw2]

This might be a 3:2 pulldown problem which only seems to happen in ntsc. (we don't have anything like that in pal, but in ntsc there *are* some sync problems.)[/b]