Newbie trying desperately to repair a LARGE AVI file

[donkom]

Hey All!

Here's my predicament:

I have here a LARGE video file, 35.6GB produced from a VHS-to-Computer device form Pinnacle. The over-all video is about 2 hours, 47mins long, and is an AVI file.

Okay, besides posting "why the heck did you choose settings to generate such a large file?!", I had no idea what I was doing at the time. sorry 'bout that! The original tape has since been lost or destroyed. I cannot recapture the video.

The video file is readable up to about the 1 hour 25min mark, and then it cuts out (becomes completely unreadable). This is true in both Adobe Premiere and in Windows Media Player.

Assuming something is wrong with the file indexing, I have tried to repair the file via VirtualDub. VirtualDub only reads the first 8408 frames, or just over 4 minutes of video before stopping. This volume roughly equated to 0.99GB. VD is not reading passed the 1GB mark for some reason and I cannot figure out why.

I haven't used any of these tools before, and generally don't deal with video. The original digital conversion was done years ago and I'm just trying to save it... it's an important video. The data seems to be there, it's just trapped!

Help!

[aedipuss]

first find out what format you created. use mediainfo. just a guess but it might be DVavi. if so then it should be readable past a dropped frame or 2. can you skip past the bad spot and view the video in premiere?

[donkom]

After the bad spot it keeps being dead in Premiere. Thanks for the info about mediainfo, this is what it generated:

Format : AVI
Format/Info : Audio Video Interleave
Commercial name : DV
Format profile : OpenDML
File size : 35.7 GiB
Duration : 2h 47mn
Overall bit rate : 30.5 Mbps

Video
ID : 0
Format : DV
Codec ID : dvsd
Codec ID/Hint : Sony
Duration : 2h 47mn
Source duration : 1h 25mn
Bit rate : 14.6 Mbps
Width : 720 pixels
Height : 480 pixels
Display aspect ratio : 3:2
Frame rate : 29.970 fps
Standard : NTSC
Color space : YUV
Compression mode : Lossy
Bits/(Pixel*Frame) : 1.412
Stream size : 17.1 GiB (48%)

Audio
ID : 1
Format : PCM
Format settings, Endianness : Little
Format settings, Sign : Signed
Codec ID : 1
Duration : 1h 25mn
Bit rate mode : Constant
Bit rate : 1 536 Kbps
Channel(s) : 2 channels
Sampling rate : 48.0 KHz
Bit depth : 16 bits
Stream size : 944 MiB (3%)
Interleave, duration : 40 ms (1.19 video frame)
Interleave, preload duration : 80 ms

[aedipuss]

well the good news it is DVavi like i thought. bad news is that if you can't skip past the error and view anything then there isn't any real video there. DVavi is about the easiest type for an editing program to handle. sorry but it's most likely a lost cause.

[robjv1]

Hey All!

Here's my predicament:

I have here a LARGE video file, 35.6GB produced from a VHS-to-Computer device form Pinnacle. The over-all video is about 2 hours, 47mins long, and is an AVI file.

Okay, besides posting "why the heck did you choose settings to generate such a large file?!", I had no idea what I was doing at the time. sorry 'bout that! The original tape has since been lost or destroyed. I cannot recapture the video.

The video file is readable up to about the 1 hour 25min mark, and then it cuts out (becomes completely unreadable). This is true in both Adobe Premiere and in Windows Media Player.

Assuming something is wrong with the file indexing, I have tried to repair the file via VirtualDub. VirtualDub only reads the first 8408 frames, or just over 4 minutes of video before stopping. This volume roughly equated to 0.99GB. VD is not reading passed the 1GB mark for some reason and I cannot figure out why.

I haven't used any of these tools before, and generally don't deal with video. The original digital conversion was done years ago and I'm just trying to save it... it's an important video. The data seems to be there, it's just trapped!

Help!

What is the content of the tape? Home movie?

[sanlyn]

I have here a LARGE video file, 35.6GB produced from a VHS-to-Computer device form Pinnacle. The over-all video is about 2 hours, 47mins long, and is an AVI file.

Okay, besides posting "why the heck did you choose settings to generate such a large file?!", I had no idea what I was doing at the time.

You might not have known what you were doing, but 35-GB is about right for a YUV AVI video over 2 hours. MediaInfo sez the video is SONY's dvsd codec (webcam?). The audio track is only half the length of the video. Think this means you have 1hr-25min of actual video and the rest is either lost or just nothing (or video but no audio).

Try running an avisynth script in VirtualDub:

DirectShowSource("Drive:\path to folders\video.avi") #<- enter path and name of your video here.

Or try opening the AVI in the older VirtualDubMPEG2 . Old stuff, still handy and popular. You might want updated VDub plugins from the same website.

[hello_hello]

You could try VirtualDubMod. If it won't open the AVI "normally" try selecting AVIsource in the "open" window, down the bottom next to "Use AVISynth template". If AVIsource doesn't do it, try DirectShowSource.

Of course that's assuming you have AVISynth installed. It's basically the same as opening the AVI via DirectShow using an AVISynth script as mentioned in the post above, only VirtualDubMod creates the script for you. I don't think VirtualDub has the same ability.