MSP lock up?

[Peter B]

I have just tried to playback through the preview of MSP 6.5 to tape from my G200. Everything seems to be going fine but it locked up about 1/3 of the way through. I rebooted and tried to create an MPEG1 file which also locked up just at the end. I rebooted again and tried playback of the timeline in MSP 6 but it locked up .

I am currently trying to create another MPEG1 in MSP 6 (Ligos) and it will be running for 6 hours so I will see what happens. However, I still need to playback to tape as well.

Any “typical” reasons why MSP locks up during playback from the timeline?

I successfully created an MPEG1 file the previous night so it all works.

Changes since then are some recaptured MJPEG files I was not happy with, in AV-IO and some additional Photoshop still images with transitions. Though the lock ups have not occurred at these points. Once it passed the new footage and the second time it never got there and in both cases it has not reached the new stills yet. I placed the newly capture files in the timeline and deleted the old ones as well.

This is the first time I have tried playback to tape from the timeline, as I have read elsewhere in this forum it works well with MSP and G200. It scrubs through all footage OK and plays back the entire timeline in Quickplay.

Some possible issues are win98SE with no additional DirectX versions installed.
Some of the files in the timeline are MJPEG, some are uncompressed from other MSP projects, one HuffYUV compressed file. It does build about 1.2 GB of preview files before trying to play it back – mostly around the uncompressed files.

Could the original crash/lock up have corrupted the MSP project file? It originally asked to recover the file but locked up again with this when encoding to MPEG, so I choose no the second time.

My ideas for a work around are:

1. I have a recent version without the latest change should I open that and make the changes and save it as something else.

2. Export a number of MJPEG files at 2GB (60 minute project) and re-import them into a new MSP project? (I used uncompressed files as the MJPEG tends to create artefacts around words in the Photoshop files especially when they are encoded to MPEG later).

Thanks for any suggestions.

System: Athlon 1Ghz, 512 MB ram, Asus A7V-E, SBlive, Marvel G200, 17Gb Maxtor (O/S), 2 x 40Gb Seagate, network card (not connected), VIA 4.34 installed

[paulw]

Peter,

I would give up on MSPRO MPEG 1 creation. It's the pits quality wize. Go to http://www.tmpgenc.com/ and download this encoder. It does great MPEG 1 and 2 files.

[Peter B]

Thanks, Yes I've got it and your right the quality is excellent.

Is there a way to get the files encoded from the MSP timeline to Tmpgenc as I only seem to be able to encode one file with it. 60 minutes of uncompressed or MJPEG is longer than 2/4GB. W2k does not work with G200 so NTFS is out (I haven't been able to get NTFS working with 3rd party apps).

I do not have enough space to export say a bunch of 2GB files and create 1 file with Vitual Dub without deleting the orginal source files with I am loath to do just in case.

Plus how do I get the playback out the Bob?

[paulw]

From what I know of MSPRO there is know way to add TMPGE as a plug in. It can I believe encode direct from Premiere but you need to win Loto in NZ to buy that thing. Playing it out to the BOB will most likey envolve enabling the video output section of the video card. It would be a better solution to buy another 20Gig hard disk for the new files.

[Dr Mordrid]

If you capture serial files using AVI_IO (file.00.avi, file.01.avi etc.) you can frameserve files straight off the HDD to TMPGEnc using an AVISynth script.

AVISynth is a scripting language that can be used from within TMPGEnc or from Premiere's timeline using the AVISynth plugin. You can get the latest build of AVISynth here;

http://www.videotools.net

The following is a the frameserving from HDD portion from my Frameserving101 FAQ;

======snip======

You can also encode segmented files (serial captures like AVI_IO or MSPro 6.5 creates) off the hard disd into a single MPEG using the following command sequence in a "segmented.avs" script;

SegmentedAVISource("filename.avi")

Place the segmented.avs script in the same folder with the segmented files and you won't have to put a path in the command sequence.

Filenames from "filename.00.avi" to "filename.99.avi" will be served in order to TMPGEnc by the script. If you have more than 100 segmented files to encode into one MPEG then use the following command;

SegmentedAVISource("filename.avi", "filename2.avi")

for capures named filename.00.avi to filename.99.avi and filename2.00.avi to filename2.99.avi.

You can keep adding new filename seqences in this manner. Needless to say a program capable of group file renaming is handy. I use Windows Commander for this.

======snip======

FWIW I *think* I've convinced Ulead to issue an open source MSPro SDK so we can get someone to program an AVISynth plugin for MSPro. Cross your fingers.

Hope this helps.

Dr. Mordrid

[Peter B]

Thanks for all the MPEG help, I ended up running with seperate files in Tmpgenc and creating a play list as discussed by Wally in my previous thread which worked perfectly

http://forums.murc.ws/showthread.php?s=&threadid=29783

However, I am still having problems with playback through the Bob.

I unchecked resize and expanded the preview window to 704 x 576 which is the size of all the video segments, all in Matrox MJPEG compression and it no longer locks up when playing but it looks to my eye that some frames are being skipped. Quickplay and instant play are both unchecked.

What are the optimal settings for MSP 6/6.5 playback with a G200?