Panasonic and Cuttermaran

[Radixmind]

Hi! Im new to this stuff.

not new to Video, i've being working with mpegs and DV for a couple of years, but i never felt the need to join a forum before, so forgive me any idiot blunders in etiquette i might make.

my question is: my workplace just got a Panasonic E55 recorder to archive video projects with. i've been using Cuttermaran successfully at home for a while, it's a nifty and useful tool. thing is, when i rip the VOB's from a disc made on the Panasonic (a finalized one) and demux with VObedit, i can load the resulting files into Cuttermaran fine, but i can't get it to perforn the final cuts!

here's what happens: the m2v and ac3 files go in, i get the preview screens, i can scrub through fine, i can choose the sections with the mark in and mark out, but when i hit 'cut video/audio' the software brings up Tmpgenc and starts to re-encode the whole thing to a big fat AVI file in my temp directory. i have Cuttermaran set to Encoding off, but it still does it.

has anyone else had this problem? could it be anything to do with the resoloution of the file? my own DV project stuff was in 720 x 576 (i'm a Brit, so it's PAL) but the files of the Panny are either 704 x576 (for SP mode) or 352 X576 (LP mode). but these are both DVD-compliant file types, arent they?

anyone know how i can do this? i know i'm a bit of a cheapskate but i dont like Womble's interface and i could never get Tmpgenc DVD to work as i wanted it to. Cuttermaran is so simple. does anyone know Tobias Arnold, the fine fellow who made the software, or how i can get in touch?

thanks for your advice, in advance. remeber, the reason i never had to join one of these forums before was because - well, your site is just too useful! i can find the answers to most problems (just not this one) just browsing around, and have done so for over 2 years. keep up the excellent work!

[reboot]

Email: Tobias Arnold (cuttermaran@gmx.net)
http://cuttermaran.kickme.to
Never had your problems with it.
Try moving tmpgenc to a different folder maybe, where cuttermaran can't find it?

[Radixmind]

thanks, reboot, for your reply.

unfortunately, making Tmpgenc unavailable to Cuttermaran doesnt solve the problem, i just get an error message from the 'Tmpgenc provider'.

are you telling me you have taken files from the panasonic and cut them in cuttermaran successfully? are you PAL or NTSC? what are the files coming out at? i have to say i'm very confused at the 704 X 576 resoloution i'm geting from the panny.

the link to the website is appreciated, unfortunately there's no useful detailed help, and the user forum is in german, which helps me not.

i'll try sending an email to Tobias Arnold, hopefully his english is better than my german.

anyone else out there experienced anything like this?

[Radixmind]

i've done a little more research and discovered that 704 x 576 PAL is the full D1 resolution for broadcasts. surely Cuttermaran should be able to handle this Rez without any need for re-encoding?

(moderators - have i posted this topic in the right forum? i dont seem to be catching much interest... apologies if i havent.)

i emailed Tobias Arnold about this, but his site warns that it could be over a week before i get any kind of response...understandable, the man probably has better things to do, like earning a crust...

[Radixmind]

as it's good form to post back when your problem gets sorted, here i am.

i downloaded the latest version of Cuttermaran (1.63) from the site and installed that, and hey presto, as they say, problem went away. i can now cut any Panasonic written files. admittedly i havent tried using it in 'encoding' mode yet, but cutting to 'real' frames of video worked just fine.

thing is, i'm pretty sure that it was the re-install, not the fact that it was a new version, that solved my problem, cos there's nothing in the version log about making it compatible with different resolution files. so somewhere along the way i fixed the problem, and i really don't know how.

which is frustrating.

i am wondering, though, if the problem was caused by the Tmpgenc standard templates that Cuttermaran uses to generate 'real' frames to cut to. i figure somewhere along the line it decided that the Rez in these files was all it was going to handle. i'm no programmer admittedly, but i'm really trying to understand what the problem was in the first place, so i can avoid it in the future.

anyone out there got more detailed experience of Cuttermaran? it seems to me there's not much in the way of english help for this program. maybe we could get all our experiences together and try to formulate some sort of 'guide' for this really useful app.

[reboot]

All my stuff is NTSC 720x480, average 4000kbps.
Haven't had any trouble at all, but yes, it takes some intuition to get it working right, and a guide (in English) would help a lot.