Grrr!!! How do I join unedited avi's before TMPGEnc-ing?

[Will Hay]

I capture small length video's of my son and then run through TMPGenc to produce SVCD.
I tend to do a couple of video's a month, and after say three months transfer them to disk.
Can someone recommend a program where I can join them to make one (reasonably) large avi and then run through TMPGEnc, rather than running each individual clip through and then joining them with the mpeg tools facility?
I know the program 'virtualdub', does this have this facility?
I don't want any tampering whilst the avi's are being joined, I just simply need them joining together.
Thanks,
Will

[mats.hogberg]

Provided that all the AVIs have the same resolution, bitrates, encoding and stuff, you can load the first, then "append" more AVIs in VirtualDub, then either save it out as AVI or just frameserver the whole bunch to TMPGEnc, to encode them all in one go.

/Mats

[CogoSWSDS]

I am running Windows 98SE so I have the 4GB file limitation. When I capture in Virtual Dub, I usually end up with several .avi files that I want to link together and process as a single data stream for TMPGEnc. AVISynth works great for this, and the scripting language is pretty straight forward. I usually write something like this:

clip00=avisource("d:\capture.00.avi")
clip01=avisource("d:\capture.02.avi")
clip02=avisource("d:\capture.03.avi")
return clip00+clip01+clip02

In addition, sometimes I only want a section of an avi, in which case on the last line of the above clip I use the trim() function on the clip in question.

When I am ready to encode in TMPGEnc instead of giving it the .avi filenames, I give it the filename of the AVISynth script (ends in .avs). AVISynth puts the clips together on the fly and to TMPGEnc it looks like one big AVI file instead of 3 or for or however many I have.

CogoswSDS

[Will Hay]

I am running Windows 98SE so I have the 4GB file limitation. When I capture in Virtual Dub, I usually end up with several .avi files that I want to link together and process as a single data stream for TMPGEnc.<snip>

Many thanks,
Will

[Will Hay]

Provided that all the AVIs have the same resolution, bitrates, encoding and stuff, you can load the first, then "append" more AVIs in VirtualDub, then either save it out as AVI or just frameserver the whole bunch to TMPGEnc, to encode them all in one go.

/Mats

Is frameserving to TMPGenc and easy operation?
How long would the output avi take to work in Virtualdub, would a 50min clip actuallt take 50min to run (just so I know what to expect)?
Many thanks,
Will

[mats.hogberg]

Frameserving is very straight forward
To enable frame serving, run AuxSetup.exe from inside the VirtualDub install dir (if you haven't done this - it's only necessary to do once) and click Install handler. Then start VirtualDub
- After loading all AVI's, just select Start Frame Server. You'll then get an alert prompting for frame server name - just click Start.
Then you can select "filename" that TMPGEnc later in the process will grab. Place it anywhere you like in your file system, like c:\allavis.avi.vdr
Open up TMPGEnc, and select this c:\allavis.avi.vdr as video source (you may have to change what file types are shown in TMPGEncs "Open File" dialog), then proceed just as when encoding a single AVI file. When the encoding is done, you can close VirtualDub.
There's no difference in encoding time using this method to what you get when encoding a regular AVI file. If you however opt for saving a merged AVI out to disc first, depending on what encoding method you choose for the output AVI, you'll do 2 encodings, thus lengthening the total time, while gaining nothing (besides a joined AVI) but loosing quality (again, depending on codec), disc space and time.
CogoSWSDS's method does exactly the same as the above, but without GUI

/Mats