Need plugin or codec to recognize Pinnacle AVIs

[thermie]

I bought a Pinnacle DV500+ capture card to digitize my VCR tapes and put them onto CD-RWs for preservation, using MPEG4 video compression and whatever for the audio and Adobe Premiere to capture the data. Most programs I'm digitizing are 50 minutes in length, or less. Little did I realize that Pinnacle uses its own form of AVI for capturing video... When I try to use 3rd party programs to convert the files, they all claim the file is unreadable.

In Adobe Premiere, I don't seem to have any MPEG or VCD plugins. I've been trying to use MPEG4, and Microsoft ADPCM compression as I couldn't find a MP3 plugin for Premiere. It crashes all the time for my 50 minute videos. (small music videos and most 24 minute programs seem to work.) I've seen a couple of plugins, but at $200-something dollars, that is way too expensive for my current budget and something Adobe should have provided in the first place (am I missing something?)

I need an inexpensive Premiere plugin to export my data to something that's a real industry standard, or a 3rd party converter which will support this goofy Premiere-Pinnacle 'standard'. Can anybody help me?

System hardware:

Athlon 1.3 Ghz CPU
768mb RAM
Windows 2000 (NTFS)
40Gb disk space (4Gb available)
ATi Radeon video
SB Live! X-gamer audio
Pinnacle DV500+ capture card

[cuervo]

Hmmm...I can offer what I used for Pinnacle DV7. The MainConcept DVcodec is supposed to be the best. I also use the Elecard MPEG2 codec for playback on WMP or their own player. I use the DiVX codec for all encode/decode of MPEG4. The M$ WMP v7 is crap...don't even bother loading it. Finally, I encode all my editted video to AVI with the MC codec then convert the finished file to VCD, SVCD DVD or Divx, depending on how I'm going to distribute. For the final encoding process I use VirtualDub and TMPGENc.

Hope this helps.

[thermie]

Thanks for responding! I tried the DIVX codec plugin under Premiere, but for any 2-pass operations it said it couldn't find the log file for input. In the config for the codec, there is a folder setting for the log file but I was assuming that's the log file created by the encoding process...

I downloaded VirtualDub and discovered that it, unlike all the other converter programs I have tried, really does support the Pinnacle AVI standard and has all the features I need (box blur, et cetera.) Needless to say, I'm completely thrilled with it. But I still need to find a MP3 compressor for it as I want the audio compressed as well. Any ideas there?

Thanks!

[pdaldegan]

That's funny, when I open the VirtualDub audio codec window, I have twice the option to mp3.
It might be that I have installed two different shareware (GoldWave and AudioGrabber) that use two different mp3 codec (BladeEnc and AudioGrabber, respectively), which are copied to the System32 directory. I guess VirtualDub is simply looking at this directory and listing the audio codecs it finds there (whether that or I am completly missing the point, ie., I just guessing).
Anyway, it might as well work for you. Go to GoldWave website (www.goldwave.com) and download the mp3 codec. Install it and see if it works.
Good lucky,
Pedro

[cuervo]

you can also install the Fraunhofer IIS Layer-3 Audio CODEC. THis is a pretty good way to go. If you can't find it, email me and I'll send a zip file to ya.