How to fix a timestamp overlap?

[WoundedPear]

Hey all. Brand new user here, and I come to you with head in hands, hoping someone might be able to offer some guidance or advice. I apologize in advance for the length of this message. I'll try to be as concise as I can.

I've put a lot of time and work into making an ambitious homemade documentary. I'm not a professional filmmaker by any stretch of the imagination, but it's been pretty rewarding to put this together. I'm working with an older version of Sony Vegas (Movie Studio Platinum 9.0). I know every video hosting site re-encodes whatever you send them to the MP4 format, but this version of Vegas can't seem to spit out any MP4 that looks acceptable. The best quality/file size balance I've found has been with WMV files. So I've always worked with WMVs and have never had a problem with them...until now.

Because of the amount of material I was drawing from, Vegas wouldn't let me edit the film as a single project. I had to break it up into smaller segments. I used Steeper (built around ASFCut) to join those segments into one larger file. Worked like a charm. Tested the file on a few different computers/media players and it played all the way through without any issues at all. Then I uploaded it to Vimeo and the trouble started.

I've uploaded dozens of WMV files to a number of different places in the past --- some of them pretty large --- and have never had any issues. Now suddenly there are all these parts of the video where the sound cuts out for a second, and it happens in some really frustrating places where a bit of dialogue or part of a song gets interrupted. It isn't the end of the world, nothing goes out of sync at any point, and the glitches could be much worse, but after all the work I put into editing this thing it's pretty disheartening to be unable to present it the way it's intended to be seen. After a bit of pestering and detective work I was able to get someone who knows about these things to tell me the issue is a "timestamp overlap" in each place where the video stutters. I've asked if there's any way to correct this or work around it, but no one will answer me. The best I've been able to get is, "Just change the format of your file to an MP4, since that's what we're going to transcode it into anyway, and all should be well."

Well, I've tried that. The same thing happens. For whatever reason, something in this WMV file doesn't respond well to the MPEG-4 codec. I've tried re-rendering each segment from scratch as higher quality WMV files so I can convert them into individual MP4 files with HandBrake and then combine them all into one file with Avidemux, and that's cut down on the stuttering to a point where I could live with it...except I can't even do that. Even though all of my files are 1280x720, because of the shifting aspect ratios of some of the footage I've used within those parameters (old Mini-DV footage, for instance), HandBrake won't let me encode all those files as 1280x720 MP4s, which makes it impossible to stitch them together. And after all the problem-solving I had to do in order to present this as one unbroken-thing, having to break it up into more than a dozen different videos would be a pretty bitter pill to swallow.

I have no problem paying for a solution, but I can't seem to find one. I'm stuck between embarrassingly awful-looking MP4 files on the one hand, or frustrating stuttering on the other, and I'm just about at my wit's end over what to do to get around this. It's almost comical that the one time I've finally run into this problem is with the one video that really means something to me.

If anyone has any ideas, I'd be profoundly grateful if you shared them with me. I've tried everything I can think of, and I keep coming up short.

[aedipuss]

first i'd say never use wmv. it was crap back then, and now it's .... take your project from the source file and render out to a lossless avi (huffyuv, lagarith, utcodec, sonyuv). file/render as/video for windows/pick anything you have installed, then change the settings to what you want. the file will be huge so use an appropriately sized hard drive. then if studio doesn't like it too bad, use something like vidcoder to convert it to mp4.


[Attachment 53025 - Click to enlarge]

[ProWo]

Try to remux it only with my clever FFmpeg-GUI. Select your wmv as source file, go to the multiplexing section, select the same file as audio file too and mux them to mkv.