Four days to reencode a file?

[EwanG]

Well, I'm getting more than a little frustrated. I have a 2 1/2 hour video that I captured initially in DV format, and then encoded as an MS MPEG-4 V2 AVI at 90 quality and 6000 bit rate.

Generally I have been happy with DV MF2 handling my other MPEG-4 files with a compilation usually taking between 3-4 hours to reencode and write to a DVD. However, with this file being so large I have had to ask it to reencode using a custom setting of MPEG-2. Even trying to reencode the MPEG-4 first hasn't helped as MF2 looks at the time length and says it's too large.

So, as mentioned in an earlier thread, I tried letting MF2 do the reencoding, and it does about 1% an hour. That means it would take almost 4 days to reencode. I "assumed" it was a problem with MF2. But today I downloaded TMPGenc and tried to reencode using it. It was just as slow.

I can't see devoting my computer (PIII 1 GhZ, 512 megs RAM, 30 Gig free on main HD, 100 Gig free on target HD, Win XP Pro) for four days for one file.

What can I do? Any suggestions appreciated.

Thanks,
Ewan

[FOO]

I think you've solved your own problem. Just
don't do it

[EwanG]

Well, that means I have to put half of the video of my kids in a play on one DVD, and the other half on another. Not really a solution for my situation.

Is the problem I'm seeing "just the way it is"? Or is there something that would let me make a proper MPEG-2 file/DVD Video file that won't take several days?

Thanks,
Ewan

[thayne]

Why are you first encoding it to mpeg 4 if your output is going to be DVD???? That makes no sense.

Just encode the DV file to mpeg-2 and be done with it.

[SquirrelDip]

Try Mainconcept MPEG Encoder - a little more expensive but much faster. Discussions here will tell you it doesn't give the quality of CCE or TMPGEnc but from what I've seen it's close.

[EwanG]

Why are you first encoding it to mpeg 4 if your output is going to be DVD???? That makes no sense.

Just encode the DV file to mpeg-2 and be done with it.

Well, this may be me being just too old, but my experience in working with computers has been that whatever format I'm working with now, I'll be using something else later.

Ideally, I'd just hold onto the native DV and encode (and edit) in one step to MPEG-2. However I don't have room to carry that many 30 Gig + files. MPEG-4 at high quality gives me a very nice looking file that I can easily manipulate in VirtualDub, and at about 1/5th the size.

Because I have had very poor success with manipulating MPEG-2 files (fewer tools that will let you edit a file, and many of them are difficult to use - YMMV), keeping them as MPEG-2 didn't seem like such a good idea. Certainly the experience I've been having here will give me room to reconsider that opinion

Still, I'd like to find an answer that will let me work with what I have even if I do go to MPEG-2 in the future.

FWIW,
Ewan

[Gees]

Can you recapture a second version in mpeg-2, DVD compliant file? Then keep your MPEG4 for archiving, but use the newly captured version for transfer to DVD.

You shouldn't need to re-encode, unless you had heavy editing to do and, at worst, you could run it through a transcoder (DVD2ONe, DVDShrink, etc.) just to resize it to fit one disc, if need be.

That'd only take 2.5 hours for the original and maybe 15 minutes to transcode.