DV avi to xvid help

[lateraldeath]

hi, can anyone tell me what's the best program/setting to convert an dv avi (from premiere pro 2.0) file to xvid? premiere pro freezes whenever i try to export it in xvid codec and virtual dub cause the video to lose a lot of quality even in twopass setting. Please help! thanks in advance.

[jagabo]

virtual dub cause the video to lose a lot of quality even in twopass setting.

That's not VirtualDub's fault. You're probably just using too little bitrate for your source.

Other things to consider:

Your DV AVI is probably interlaced. Although Xvid supports interlaced encoding you won't find many players that do anything sensible with interlaced material. You probably want to inverse telecine or deinterlace for Xvid.

Xvid supports Display Aspect Ratios that are independent of the frame size but some players don't respect the DAR. So it's best to encode with a frame size that matches the aspect ratio of the source. If your source is 4:3 DV AVI you should resize to a 4:3 frame. 640x480 for example. If you want to use very low bitrates you'll want to use a smaller frame size.