MJPEG source, unable to encode to DivX

[cheerful]

I shot a few AVI with my digital camera. The AVI files are 30 fps, 640x480 MJPEG. I use PICVideo decompressor.

I loaded the video into Premiere and did some quick cut. Then used "Export Movie" with the following setting (most of are default since I don't really know them)

File Type: Microsoft AVI
Video only
Embedding Options: Project
Codec: DivX Pro 5.2.1
Millions of colors
640 h 480 v
30.00 fps
Square pixel

Data Rate:
unchecked Limit Data Rate to
checked Recompress "Maintain Data Rate"

Deinterlace Video Footage
checked Optimize Stills

DivX codec is set to progressive source, Fast, 780 kbps, 1-pass

The result file is rather large, 271MB for 8min. This is about 4 mbps.

Worse, it is UNPLAYABLE. It will crash any WMP and VirtualDub. I got the following in VD:

An out-of-bounds memory access (access violation) occurred in module 'VirtualDub'......while decompressing video frame 0 with "DivX Pro(tm) 5.2.1 Codec" [biCompression=30355844] (VideoSource.cpp:1772).

After fiddling around with deinterlace (set premiere to lower field first and DivX to deinteralce) and uncheck Recompress, now I get an AVI file that I can play. But with very low quality and large 4mbps.

I remember doing this some time before on smaller video (320x24) and it worked fine. Am I missing some settings?

Thanks!

[SaSi]

Have you tried loading the source video (MJPEG) to VirtualDUB directly?

You can do the same editing there.

If VirtualDUB can open the file, then during conversion to DivX (saving) select:

Compression Speed = Slow, Encode in 1 pass quality based with a Q factor of 5~6, encoding progressive or interlaced, depending on the source - probably interlaced - and key frame every 100 frames.

If it is still too large, increase the Q factor until size becomes adequate while quality doesn't suffer.