Trying to make a living

[kleinbull]

I've been playing around at home with the MillG400/RR-G for almost a year now and am really enjoying making kid's school productions, recording cartoon VCD's, etc.

I still have much to learn, but I was thinking about trying to make some money selling CD's/VCD's to the parents of the kids in my sons class, recording and producing the kids activities, plays, field trips, etc.

Unfortunately, I'm of limited resources to buy expensive editing hardware/software. Basically, I have a desent camcorder, PIII733 w/MillG400DH/RR-g, UleadMSP5.0, Nero 5.5, and the best share stuff; AVI_IO reg w/HuffYUV, TMPGEnc, etc.

I'm basically using TMPGEnc with my YUY2 recodings to cut/join/mux/demux, then creating PBC with Nero for my current stuff. The quality is great, but I feel I need transitioning and effects to make things for sale.

I'm still uncomfortable with MSP5.0, cause I dont understand the format it wants to save in, is it an image file that I can use with Nero?, and I'm afraid I'm not getting the video quality I get with TMPGEnc.

So I guess my questions are, is it worth the money to buy Ulead MSP6.0 w/DVD creation? is the quality of MPEG-1/MPEG-2 better? or do I just need more share stuff to do the job adequetly?

I guess I'm just looking to enhance my current financial situation or myabe even someday getting out of this cyclic semi-conductor industry, ahhh.

Ahhhh, sorry this got so loooong, but...

1 more thing. Can anybody recommend a good audio editor that will allow me to save in mp2 format. Nero WAV Editor doesn't even recognize the MPEG-1, layer 2 file I pulled off an AVI_IO home movie. Is that uncommon?

Thanks

J.Klein

[pacguy]

c-dex <a href="http://www.cdex.n3.net">(http://www.cdex.n3.net)</a>
the cd ripper has a mp2 encoder, but not a editor.

[wkulecz]

Selling VCD's is unlikely to be a money maker since getting them to play on stand-alone DVD players is more miss than hit.

People go out and buy the cheapest junk they can find, not understanding what they are giving up -- if every DVDplayer could play VCD on CD-R there'd be a thriving market for specility productions. But there isn't so not being able to read VCD on CD-R doesn't seem like a big deal because Joe blow public isn't aware of the possibilities.

At least you can count on people being able tp watch VHS tapes, althought these are a lot more trouble to make with good quality.

--wally.

[kleinbull]

hmmm

Yes, I guess that was my thinking too. Probably why I was thinking MSP6.0 wouldn't be worth the money right now. Of about 20 parents who have computers, maybe 3-4 would have a DVD player capable of actually playing a presentation created for VCD.

However, the ones with computers could certainly play whatever videos I record and view pictures I pull from recordings. This would still be a good reason for converting to VCD since it takes up so much less space. If I make everything in the VCD format with Nero, files can still be played as .dat on most PC media players, right?

I guess that answers my own question about making a VCD presentation, when all I really have to do is drop a bunch of files onto some CD-R/RWs. Still there must be a better way to put them all together for presenting in a media player o a PC?

I hope everyone doesn't mind my mindless ramblings. This is the only place I can talk about such things and get intelligent(mostly) feedback and ideas for moving forward and getting better. I really appreciate all the help from this forum.

Still looking for a way to edit those mp2 audio files. I'm trying to get rid of background noise from my son's kindergarten graduation and hear only the names being called for diplomas.
Does c-dex allow you to save an excisting mp2 file as a .wav and then convert the wav back to mp2?

Kindergarten diplomas hehe

Thanks

J.Klein

[Rob100]

WaveLab 3.0 can open Mpeg1 layer 2 audio files. Once edited you could save out as WAV and re-encode to MP2 using tooLame, TMPEG etc.

If you want to use your existing WAV editor (and don't have WaveLab) then you could always use Graphedit to decode the MP2 to a PCM wav.

Rob.