Joining .avi/.mpg for VCD

[BobMoyer]

I am starting an editing project which at this point seems monumental to me. I am sure that someone else has "been there...done that". I sure would appreciate any pointers:

I have a VHS tape of my grandson's first Christmas. It is about
1hr/6minutes in length but I can edit out quite a bit of it if I have to.
My plan was to import/record it onto a digital tape and then capture small
segments (about 5-10 minutes worth) as an avi file. I figure I will end up
with about 10-12 files. As I capture the files, I was going to convert them
to mpg files and then save them onto a CDRW disk until I have all 10 mpg
files done. The reason I was planning to have so many smaller files is that
I only have about 5 gig on my "work" partition. If I create a VideoCD by
adding these 10 mpg files in the proper order, will it play through
seamlessly or will it stop at the end of each file? Is there a better way?

The capturing software is Sony's DVGate and MGI's VideoWave III. What I have used so far to convert to .mpg has been TMPGEnc. And the VCD burning software is Sony's CD Extreme.

Thanks,
Bob

[Truman]

You should consider to use a capture codec like PicVideo to be able to capture larger files.
Since TMPGEnc does not handle >2gig files, I suggest to use VirtualDub frameserver.
If nothing helps and you really need to convert in small parts, then use TMPG'sMPEG tools to join the mpegs. At the end it will play through seamlessly. I did that with MPEG-1 once.

[Vejita-sama]

Right, what you plan to do will work. I like Huffyuv over PICVideo but that's a personally choice. If you want all the MPEG files to play seamlessly you'll need to either

1) Cut/paste them together (need lots of HD space, and takes a lot of time)

2) Use VCDImager (or one of it's GUIs) to seamlessly link the MPEG files (I like TSCV for this).

Also, I'm not sure what your system looks like or how much money you have, but HDs are fairly cheap. You can get a 40GB drive for less than $100 and it would make you life SO MUCH easier, esp if you plan to do more video editing in the future. I got a 60GB drive I use just for stuff like this ($125). Good luck!!!

[mijman]

If you make a VCD of all 10 segments they will pause for about half a second, while it goes to the next file. If you choose spots that are not noticeable, you'll get away easier.
I did much the same thing with my Wedding video.

[Vejita-sama]

Yes there will be a pause when it goes to the next file, that's why I said you should use VCDImager to join all of them together as one image file, that way they'll be seamless.

The other option is to cut/paste them together, but this is a pain and uses a lot of HD space (creating new files for each cut/paste operation).

[Graham Meredith]

You can "join" so to speak, the AVI's in Virtual Dub, using the APPEND function, so long as the files were captured at the same frame rate/size etc. This will allow you to edit all of the clips in the same time line as if they were one large clip, well over 2 Gigs in appended size (this isn't breaking the 2 gig limit in Windows, because you haven't rendered the "joined" files - they're not really joined, only accessed). You then frameserve them to TMPEGEnc to convert them to .mpg VCD format. You have to be careful that your final .mpg file size doesn't end up greater than 2 gig, though, or Windows will split the dummy (or 4 gig for win NT/2000). A 2 gig .mpg file in VCD format will be 200 minutes long.

Graham

PS you need the latest VirtualDub 1.4.7 to do this

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Graham Meredith on 2001-09-05 23:44:57 ]</font>