Processing Video Clips for best quality...

[chewie8008]

I am currently trying to figure out how to process certain video clips with a little better quality. I have a Canon SD450 Digital camera. I am making little home movies of small spliced together clips.(80-90 clips 5-15 seconds in length). The camera is shooting at 640x480 at 30fps. Which is ok quality I guess for a digital camera. So I have been using TMPGenc and Virtualdub to compress/cut and join them. I use a MPEG4 codec in VirtualDub to quickly compress and then cut it before compressing. Then I take the mpeg4 result and put it in TMPGenc to format it to 352x240 and then join all the clips with TMPGenc. I don't run it through TMPGenc as 640x480 because the quality is less than that of 352x240. I guess because of the format.

What i'm trying to find is a program to easily join these 640x480 at good quality. I know VirtualDub can splice these files but I have to do them one at a time.(When I have 80-90 clips that would take forever). With TMPGenc I can click all the files at once and throw them all together. I have VirtualDub 1.5.10...

[redwudz]

One method you might try with VirtualDub is to name all your video files with extensions like .00.avi, .01.avi, .02.avi, ...

Then you can then simply load the first one (the .00.avi), the other segments will be loaded automatically. You can then work with them as if they were a single file. (I found this on the Doom9 website.)

And the newer versions of VD seem to do a better job with joining.

One further step, if you plan to make these clips into a MPEG video. You can use direct stream copy, depending on the filetype and no re-encoding will occur. Or the better method, IMO, is to frameserve the edited video directly to TMPGEnc encoder. It's easy to do, very fast and you won't end up with a extra file taking up space on your hard drive.

Here's one guide for frameserving: https://www.videohelp.com/virtualdubframeserve.htm

I would also try 352 X 480 (1/2 D1) for your MPEG encodes. 352 X 240 loses a lot of information. See 'WHAT IS' DVD to the upper left on this page for the DVD specification. I wouldn't do more than one framesize conversion if you can avoid it. Every re-encode diminishes quality.

VD also has many filters available that can make some video files look better. Take a look here for some available filters: http://neuron2.net/ or http://neuron2.net/other.html

[edDV]

I'm sure you understand that digital camera MJPEG "video" files are far more compressed than camcorder video. Even at 640x480 they are 3-10x more compressed than MiniDv.

The Elf SD450 is at the higher end of compression. More here
https://forum.videohelp.com/viewtopic.php?t=327385&highlight=pentax

[chewie8008]

Cool, i'll try 352x480. I'll have to read up on the frameserving, sounds promising. I figured there had to be a quicker/easier way.

Yes, I know that camcorders take better quality than digital cameras, but considering I got my camera(which I love) for $300 when it was new, and I already have it and don't have the $500+ to buy a camcorder...i'm making do.

Thanks for all the help!