recorded live feeds of big brother7 how to change avi to mpeg2?

[janeydoll]

I have recorded the live feeds of big brother 7 and they record in avi format, now i want to edit and title the recordings in ulead video studio 10 and then make menus with dvdlab studio, i have never done avi so hopefully i am just doing something wrong, but there is no audio after i take my edited avi and change to mpeg2 in ulead, and the quality goes down tremendously.

could someone please help me or just tell me what i need to do to go take the avi feed, edit, and then what format to use for dvdlab studio to make dvd movie?

i am trying to help a website on making videos so please reply as soon as possible, i am running behind on getting her the feeds.

thank you so much.

[Baldrick]

please give us more information about the avi file. like the video and audio codec, video framerate and video size.

you can identify avi with avi2clipboard and post here.

[steveryan]

So you already have the feeds on your hard drive and you want to convert the AVI files to MPEG? Have you tried the Convert or Guides section to the left of the screen? There's loads of AVI to MPEG/DVD guides.

[janeydoll]

i use camtasia to record the feeds it that makes a difference, i am downloading that program right now.

thanks for the help

[Baldrick]

does camtasia record audio? do you hear any audio in the avi file?

[janeydoll]

yes it records audio

[janeydoll]

i cant get that program to work, can't you just tell me what to do? it might be the DV i thougth i saw that

[janeydoll]

can you please just tell me if what i am doing is wrong & how to do it right? i think it is dv-avi please

[janeydoll]

frame size - 240x180
compression - tech smith screen capture codec (but there are alot of other options to choose from if that helps)

audio - PCM (but alot of others to choose from)

NTSC non-drop frame (30 fps)
Microsoft AVI files
24 bits, 240 x 180, 15 fps
Frame-based
TechSmith Screen Capture Codec
80 Key frame rate:
PCM, 22.050 kHz, 16 Bit, Mono

does this help?

[guns1inger]

With a 240 x 180 resolution to start with, there is little point going to anyhting higher than VCD resolution. The enlarging process is only going to reduce the quality substantially, as you have discovered. I don't know if VS10 can output 352 x 240 mpeg 2. Your framesize is postage stamp to begin with, and even going to VCD res is an upscale of over 50%, so expect it to be softer. Also, your frame rate needs to be almost doubled, which will most likely give you a lot of duplication and jerkiness.

Your audio needs to be upsampled to 48khz, which is also a big ask, and with the framerate changes, you risk losing audio sync.

In short, your source material is about as bad as you can get, and you should try to keep you expectations set accordingly. This will never even get to VHS quality.

What happens if you try to open this in virtualdubmod ? Do you get audio ?

In future, if you can't get avi2clipboard to work, try avicodec instead.

[jimmalenko]

i am trying to help a website on making videos so please reply as soon as possible, i am running behind on getting her the feeds.

That's rather ironic

I hope the big brother streams are public domain and you're not violating their terms of service by distributing it to others


But yes, your source is pretty ordinary, even for conversion to VCD, let alone the Half D1 or Full D1 frame sizes. Obviously since you can't repeat the capture of live streaming, you're pretty much stuck with what you have

There's an old adage:

"You can polish a turd to make it look all shiny and new; but at the end of the day, it's still a turd."

What this means is that no matter what "window-dressing" you do to this video, don't expect massive improvements in quality no matter what you do. The quality of the live feed was probably poor to begin with, and then your capture of it was poor again. The cumulative effect of these two issues plus another conversion in the wings means that there's a lot of lossy processes involved.

As guns1inger mentioned, you have quite a bit of work to do to get this anywhere near DVD (or VCD) compliance. I agree that 352 x 240 will be your best frame size, and I would also suggest some light filtering to negate the effects of the resize up. I generally do a light noise removal when resizing up by large amounts. This results in a softer picture, but I would rather see smooth images as opposed to grainy and pixelated images. I would use AVISynth and virtualdub to co-ordinate my filtering/editing, but then I use an MPEG encoder (TMPGEnc Plus) that accepts AVISynth files directly, so I just load it into there directly.

For your audio, I would suggest extracting the audio with virtualdub - http://members.dodo.net.au/~jimmalenko/ExtractAudio.htm might help. I would then convert to 48KHz 192kbps 2ch AC3 with ffmpeggui.