where are all you Guru's?

[brendin]

I want to create a 650MB mpeg1 movie. The problem is the 2GB limit on AVI's this will only allow me to capture 20 minutes using MJPEG on my matrox card. I will have 3 AVI files for 650MB worth of MPEG1. What do I use to encode these 3 AVI files into one MPEG 1 file?

Anyone?

[Andreas]

Use VirtualDub's VCM frame server.

You can join several avis, but (due to
an error) you can not cut frames from
the movie. Read the helpfile how to
save a striped avi file, then start the
VCM frame server. Then you can use
for example Ligos MPEG-encoder to generate
one single MPEG-file.

Andreas

[Dayspring]

Howdy,

Just wondering, are you capturing full size video (704x480 or um.... PAL... sorry, ignorant American here... )? I should imagine you would be able to capture more than 20 minutes if you cut the video size down to quarter size capture, which is the full size of normal MPEG-1 anyway.

I realize that you might expect to lose some image quality starting from a smaller size, but considering the fact that you can capture much, much more under the limit, it might not be a bad idea. Besides, honestly, I don't think you should lose too much, since MPEG-1 has to drop much of that image quality anyway. Also, I should imagine, but I could be entirely wrong, that encoding a source that is nearer to the same capture size as the MPEG to be produced would take less time than having to downsample like that.

Regardless, there are a lot of programs for basic NLE that should let you cut up the original AVI's and then combine them and save the final movie as an MPEG. I happen to know that both Premiere 5 and Ulead Media Studio Pro 6 support at least plugins for output directly to MPEG. Avid Cinema might, but I've never really used it.

Hope this helps,
Matt