Does my video look too choppy to you?

...and if it does, why do you think that is? Click here

I transferred my original tapes (recorded in 1984) to DVD-RAM in XP mode. I then take that disc and run it through TDA to encode it to MPEG. I then do any editing in TMPGenc MPEG Editor. I then load my mpeg file into TMPGENC 3.0 to encode to .wmv. I then take that file and load it into Windows Media Maker to get it down to a reasonable size for viewing and downloading. I have another example here that does not exhibit this at all, same work flow. Weird because I've down this thousands of times. Thoughts?

Click here for another example that isn't choppy.

If you step through your video frame by frame you'll see that often the same frame repeats several times in a row (for example, at about 14.5 seconds into the video as the camera zooms away from the bass). I suspect the DVD recorder is dropping frames because of a bad sync signal, and substituting the previous good frame as many times as necessary to keep A/V sync.

You can verify this by stepping through the orignal MPEG file from your DVD-RAM. If the problem is there then you know that's the source of your problem.

Originally Posted by zoobie

2 choppy?
either it is or it isn't
I'm not dl'ing a 18mb file to see
probably too much re-encoding
you've got at least one extra step in there
I have over 100 wmv clips online...all as smooth as silk

Well, sometimes it is and sometimes it isn't, how's that? That's like trying to diagnose a car problem w/o popping the hood or taking it for a drive. It isn't necessay to download, with WMP you can view directly from my site. I've got at least that many online and those didn't result in any problems as evidenced in the second clip I posted with the same workflow. There are a lot of steps. I don't see what I can eliminate though. Can you post your work flow?Here is another example that is fine.

Originally Posted by jagabo

If you step through your video frame by frame you'll see that often the same frame repeats several times in a row (for example, at about 14.5 seconds into the video as the camera zooms away from the bass). I suspect the DVD recorder is dropping frames because of a bad sync signal, and substituting the previous good frame as many times as necessary to keep A/V sync.

You can verify this by stepping through the orignal MPEG file from your DVD-RAM. If the problem is there then you know that's the source of your problem.

I'm going to check - thanks.

No repeated frames. I did encode this into a divx file and it looked great. I encoded it with the slider in TMPGEnc towards 'motion' at 50% but there was a slight degradation in picture quality.

It does look choppy.

I use DVD-RAM because I record musical performances (one song) off the air and post them on various forums on the internet; it's really easy to deal with, I don't have to finalize a whole DVD-R to rip one .mpg file from it. TMPGEnc DVD Author converts the .vro file into a .mpg file. I then load that file into TMPGEnc to convert. It is my understanding that no re-encoding has taken place up until it is converted to .wmv. I tried loading the .mpg file into WMM and it loads up, but when I try and save it to my computer I get the message below. I've been working with .wmv for a while because it is most compatible among the forums that I post in but after seeing the quality of Divx, I think those people are just going to have to download the player that stuff looks great. I'd post the clip in Divx but you said you didn't want to d/l it.

Oh, yes I do, it's a 250 gb drive with hardly anything on there!

So it IS about settings, that's what I thought. Thanks for your help. Can you tell me what you use and a few of the basic settings? TMPGEnc has a slider that moves from motion on one side and quality on the other, that cured about 90% of the problem. This really was the oddball, most of my other clips look fine. Nah, it's not a video site, they are artist forums or guitar/amp forums, etc. Hey, thanks again for your time.

Thanks for taking the time out to help me. I think I'm going to go the Divx route. I just pasted the link below into WMP 10 and it fired right up, looks great to me and I think everybody that owns a PC has that on their computer. Check it out if you want; thanks again, man.

http://myfavoritevideoclips.com/robclips/robtoday.divx

Most people may have WMP but not everybody will have a Divx/Xvid/MPEG4 codec. And WMP will not automatically download missing MPEG4 codecs like it does for WMV3.