Help:VDUB:CANNOT APPEND SEGMENT segment has a different number of streams

[lil_Dee]

Hi I'm trying to edit my aunts 20yr old wedding video as an aniversary gift (1 weeks time) & put it on dvd for her but i'm quite new to editing & in need of some help. Let me begin by listing how far i've got....

I've managed to capture the original video & save it as an avi in xvid format. Now the video had some start & end credits with Graphics & computer music (that was proberbly done on on a BBC Basic or Commadore Amiga, remember those?) which she always hated so I've cut them off & just left the MAIN video using Vurtual Dub. Now the music at the start continued after the credits through the first part of the actual video which I want to keep. So I saved this section as INTRO in Virtual dub using direct stream no sound settings.

Now here's my problem, I have tried to append the INTRO clip back onto the MAIN clip & got the following error message "CANNOT APPEND SEGMENT the segment has a different number of streams", i'm assuming this is because the INTRO clip now has no audio stream where as the MAIN clip has both audio & video streams, Can anyone direct me to the correct way to achieve the results required either with Virtualdub or an alternative application please?

[guns1inger]

First place I would start is by re-capturing the video in DV AVI format, or better, not Xvid. Xvid is highly compressed and very poor for editing. It also does not like being re-encoded, and quickly produces artifacts.

However, if you wish to persist on going down this path, I would use Audacity to create a silent clip of the length of the intro, and save it with the same settings as the original audio. Use virtualdubmod or avimuxgui to mux the audio and intro video together so you now have an audio stream and can join the segments together.

However I would still recommend you go back to the start, recapture properly, and edit in Windows Movie Maker.

[RabidDog]

Go back, and recapture the whole lot as DV avi.. this is far larger than mpeg2 and orders of magnitude bigger than xvid. However it is what most editing programs expect to work with.
If you cannot do that, go back and get the footage as mpeg2, which is less editable than DV .. but still not too bad.
Then you pick apart you assets .. sound ... video .. effects .. intersplices.
Re combine in your editor of choice, at will, with snazzy effects.
xvid was never meant to be edited, its too highly compressed and will look like pre-rented VHS at the end.

Failing this, a [s:e74f5d3c23]bottle[/s:e74f5d3c23] crate of her favorite tipple is a good alternative.

[lil_Dee]

unfortunately I dont own A video recorder & would have to re-borrow 1 to do that but I do have the original film now as vobs is there another application I could use to convert the vobs to avi (i have auto guardian knot but it wont work in Windows Vista or windows 7)?

[AlanHK]

unfortunately I dont own A video recorder & would have to re-borrow 1 to do that but I do have the original film now as vobs is there another application I could use to convert the vobs to avi

Much better: forget about AVI.
If in VOBs then it is already DVD compliant MPEG.
Any conversion to AVI and back again (when you make the DVD) will just degrade it.


Use a tool like VOB2MPEG to, you guessed it, extract MPEG files from the VOBs.
Then use an MPEG editor.

I can recommend Womble's MPEG-VCR, it can cut and join MPEG with no loss.
You can demux (to separate the audio and video), then edit the audio in an audio editor.
There are other video editors with integrated audio editors, not cheap though.

Then you can use a DVD authoring app to put the edited MPEG back into DVD format (this is also lossless).
Many choices; I like GuiforDVDAuthor.

[lil_Dee]

great, can you also recommend a simple audio editor to remove the original computer music? And maybe a good video editors with integrated audio editors that will allow me to add some new tittle/end credits with music please (both freeware & commercial)?

[AlanHK]

great, can you also recommend a simple audio editor to remove the original computer music?

I like Audacity.
It's free, and has a lot of online help.
The latest "beta" 1.3.7, is very powerful, it can use ffmpeg to read and write to AC3 (the usual audio format for DVD MPEG).

And maybe a good video editors with integrated audio editors that will allow me to add some new tittle/end credits with music please (both freeware & commercial)?

I don't have any experience there.
But MPEG-VCR will edit MPEG, video + audio, and joins with some simple effects. But not, as far as I know, any audio editing.

[redwudz]

AlanHK's method is probably the easiest, but since you mentioned VDub, You could use VirtualDub Mod and open the VOB and convert it to DV format using the Cedocida DV Codec, then editing would be easy in VD(M). About 13GB/hour for DV.

Or for the best quality using VD(M), encode to HuffyUV or Lagarith Lossless Video Codec and you can use any of the hundreds of VD filters available if it needs cleaning up and have minimal quality loss. But you will have very large files, so have lots of hard drive space available. (25GB/Hour? Not sure)

Then you can re-encode the finished product back to the format of you choice again with minimal loss. If my final format is going to be DVD, I frameserve the edited video direct from VD(M) to my MPEG-2 encoder, and then author and burn. Frameserving eliminates having a edited version of the video taking up space on your hard drive.

And I would also recommend Audacity. It's very versatile.

And welcome to our forums.

[lil_Dee]

Thanks for all your help so far guys, I have taken your collective advice and i now have an mpeg intro clip with no sound (edited with Mpeg-vcr & Audacity) & the main movie without the horrible original BBC basic music track & credits.

My problem now is I have tried to use Movie maker to add Start/end credits & my own edited audio & all went well but for ONE problem, I've found that the credits text varies dependent on the amount of text in each frame, Can you recommend an app both free or commercial that will allow me to set the font size so that there's no variation from frame to frame in the font size used regardless of the volume of the text used?

Remember nothing too complicated as this is my first project. I want to be able to use the final movie with edited intro & end credits/music in Windows DVD Maker (i know its not that great but there's a menu in it she likes).


Any help would be greatly appreciated.


Tia

[guns1inger]

Make you credits as still images in any image application (Paint.net is free, as is GIMP), then use WMM or Photostory to create the credit sequence from these.