how to encode frameserved audio?

[dbarndt]

Hi,

First of all, let me say THANK YOU for this forum. It has been invaluable in helping my preparation, purchase, setup, etc. of converting VHS tapes to DVDs. This is the first time in over a year that I could not find an answer to a question I have.

After capturing a couple DV AVI clips, I've created an AVS script to merge them, trim/fade the ends, and cross fade the transitions. It looks great in VirtualDub.

The question is the encoding. Previously, when my source was just a straight AVI file, I used TMPGEnc Plus 2.5 to encode the video from AVI to MPEG-2, and ffmpegGUI to encode the audio from WAV to AC3. Now, I want to use the above frameserved source instead of a file itself as the source. It looks like TMPGEnc Plus 2.5 w/ReadAVS could handle the video portion, but I don't see how ffmpegGUI can do "frameserved audio".

Is this correct, and if so, what options are there? (For example, do I have to upgrade to TMPGEnc XPress 3.0 with the AC3 plugin?)

Thank you again for all the help already!

Dave

[dbarndt]

Hi again,

I should also add that after loading the AVS file into VitualDub, I thought maybe I could save the resulting "edited" AVI (using the Direct Stream Copy method), with the hopes of then being able to encode its video/audio separately as I had done before.

Unfortunately, the saving process seemed to go VERY SLOW and looked like it was going to create a HUGE file (a minute was 1 GB!?!). If anyone could enlighten me as to why that was happening I'd appreciate it too.

Thanks!

Dave

[dbarndt]

Maybe I'm answering my own question!

I just found the place in VirtualDub that lets you extract the audio (WAV in my case) stream from whatever's loaded (in this case, the frameserved source). I tried the extraction and it seemed to work! Now that I have a separated audio stream, maybe I can serve the frameserved video into TMPGEnc Plus 2.5 as I had done the actual AVI file before.

Stay tuned,
Dave

[bunyip]

Hi Dave,

Well done!
Yes you're on the right track.

[dbarndt]

Thanks for the vote of confidence, bunyip!

That seems to have worked! I was able to use ffmpegGUI to encode the extracted audio to AC3, and merge it at authoring time (TMPGEnc DVD Author) with the MP2 video encoded with TMPGEnc Plus 2.5.

I've learned some stuff about AVISynth as well that I think I'll post elsewhere, because I'm sure a lot of people have a similar setup to mine. Hopefully this little episode will help someone out there as well.

Dave

[dbarndt]

By the way, can anyone explain this to me? I know uncompressed video is large, but this didn't make any sense...

I should also add that after loading the AVS file into VitualDub, I thought maybe I could save the resulting "edited" AVI (using the Direct Stream Copy method), with the hopes of then being able to encode its video/audio separately as I had done before.

Unfortunately, the saving process seemed to go VERY SLOW and looked like it was going to create a HUGE file (a minute was 1 GB!?!). If anyone could enlighten me as to why that was happening I'd appreciate it too.

Dave

[dipstick]

Uncompressed RGB is 30 MBs per second. It creates a bitmap of every frame (about 1 MB for 720 x 480). You can select to use compression, then chose a codec installed on your system.

By the way, I always encode Video and audio seperately. I usually frameserve the video out of the Timeline. I then save the Audio to wav and later encode it to ac3.

[celtic_druid]

You should be able to pipe an avs via avs2wav to ffmpeg, although personally I haven't tried it. Also MakeAVI's can create fake wav's from an avs script. No way to get that into ffmpeg though as it doesn't support ACM decompressors.