Pinnacle Studio 8

[satis]

I was just wondering if anyone knew anything about this program. I'm having some issues with lag in compiled video clips. If anyone has any clue, I'm more than open to suggestions. :)

[Atomic-Design]

I have no idea. Usually I just stick to Macromedia or Adobe software.

[blurchy]

hi i know pinnacle 7

which is close enuf

what exactly do u mean by lag ?


and when you say compiled video clips do you mean

projects ?

as in all the clips are inside pinnacle

or finished clips themselves

[Ddr]

I was just going to ask those same questions and refer them to you for help, since you are the resident expert in this area.


It may or may not help to look at this thread, too.

http://forum.powweb.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=7496

Good luck

Dale

[blurchy]

hi ddr thanks

resident expert hey i like that lol :)

roberts pretty well up on video too

and spideree

i need to have much more info from satis b4

i can help :)

[satis]

hey, cool, I wasn't expecting such a response. :) I posted it in another forum and got a bunch of "eh?" responses (not powweb, elsewhere). Anyway...

allow me to desribe what I'm doing. I ripped some DVD's that I own to SVCD (mpg2), which in turn are broken into 768MB chunks or whatever to fit on a CD. Just FYI, I own these DVDs and this is legal (not bypassing encryption, not violating DMCA). Anyway, blah.

I'm taking this mpg and taking clips out of it and arranging them into a new video file....ie, I'm trimming some of the cooler parts out of the movie and making a "cooler" movie...or a highlights movie, or whatever. Anyway, when I output the movie (I've done it to SVCD and uncompressed AVI both) the movie comes out "laggy". IE, the video kinda freezes about every second, audio/video loses sync for a moment, etc. I went ahead and burned the video file to a CD and played it in my DVD player and it's the same stuff, so it's not just a Window media player problem or whatever. I've got a pretty beefy computer, so I don't think it's a problem with my hardware not being up to snuff...I'll post system stats below if you're interested.

Anyway, any ideas? Right now I'm playing with the idea the source mpeg is screwed up, so that may be the whole issue. I played it (it takes forever to load 768MB of mpeg...) and there seems to be maybe a bit of lag, though not as pronounced as the final product. Blah, anyway, I was curious if you guys had any ideas. System stats follow:

WinXP
1.2ghz AMD Athlon
512MB pc133 cas2 RAM
geforce4 ti4600
2 30GB ata100 drives in a Raid 0 array

anyway, any assistance or tips would be useful. I'll be happy to answer any additional questions.

[blurchy]

hi

I ripped some DVD's that I own to SVCD (mpg2), which in turn are broken into 768MB chunks or whatever to fit on a CD.

do these mpg 2s play ok off your hard drive
the ones youve ripped i mean ?
if they do it wont be them

assuming they play ok
the video and audio have to be locked together
merged (cant remember what this is called now)

another problem could be the frame rate
of the movie if youre doing it a huge t.v. size
768x576 25fps (england) at a high data rate
and looking at it on a computer
expecting it to look perfect it wont
the resolution is different
it will look ok soon as you put it to video

if youre trying to just put it on cd
to look at on computer
then make it no bigger than 320x240 25fps or 30fps
it will give you the best results


the other thing is the hard drive rpm
7,200 rpm is the best for video editing
if its lower than this it may not play like it should
from your hard drive
its something to do with processing speed

mpegs do lag when you edit them together
every time you preview them they have to uncompress themselves they arent as good as .avi
and take miles longer to render

best thing you can do is drop the data rate
down on a clip
until you get one that plays
and and have some settings that work

try intel indeo video5 at 100% as the compressor
uncompressed video will be jerkier
it puts a massive strain
on most systems and doesnt
give the best result

[satis]

thanks for the quick response:

there's alot of respond to, so bear with me. :)

my harddrives are 5400rpm, but they are in a striped RAID array, which should (I think) more than make up for the slow rotational speeds. I still don't meet scsi speeds, of course, but it's alot faster than traditional ATA100.

the files I'm working from are mpg files with the audio mixed in already. I think the program that makes it is bbmux or something crazy like that...sorry if I'm less than complete about this, as it's all very new to me. I used DVD2SVCD (the program, doom9.net), and this is one of the detritus files it leaves behind while encoding the SVCD image files. These files DO appear to lag a bit while playing off the harddrive, which kinda confuses me since the final SVCD image, burned onto a CD, doesn't lag at all. My next step is to copy the actual mpg off the SVCD cd and trying a run with that.

When you say the audio and video have to be locked together, I'm not entirely sure wha t you mean. My guess would be there's some sort of keyframe sorta system that resyncs the audio every X frames (makes sense to me, at least) but I have no clue if the mpgs I'm working from have that. I would imagine the final SVCD mpg off the cd would have that, so that'll also be a nonissue when I make the next attempt. The resolution is a rather odd one, to maintain the "wide view" aspect...errr...I forget the ratio. 16:9? Something like that. Sorry, I couldn't tell you without actually looking it up, and I'm currently at work. It will eventually be output to a tv (21" I think), so I would prefer to maintain the current size. It's running at just shy of 25fps...close enough it may as well be 25fps.

Since I'm encoding it from an mpg to an mpg, that might have something to do with the lag. Would you happen to know of any utility that I can use to decode the SVCD mpg to avi or some other, uncompressed format? I imagine I could use pinnacle studio to do that, but I would be afraid it would introduce some lag into the avi output because of decoding slowdowns, if you know what I mean. Unforutanetly, Bink and Smacker won't read SVCD (I love that/those program(s)).

In fact, on that note, are you aware of any program that can break an mpg into parts easily? I actually only want to copy maybe 100MB worth of data, all of that in the latter half of the 768MB source file. It sucks waiting 10 minutes for the file to load and get 'parsed' (if that's the proper word).

Anyway, thanks alot for the help, and I apologize for the verbose responses. :)

[satis]

ok, update, I copied the svcd mpg off the cd (which I checked in my DVD player, it runs fine), and it lags when I play it, it lags when I import it into the program, and the output lags even as an avi, Indeo 5.1 100% encoded. The size is 720x480. I stripped the sound off during the compilation process (just to eliminate that as a possible lag cause) and it didn't matter. I think there's just something wrong with my computer. :( I'm gonna keep trying, just because I refuse to give up, but it's a bit disheartening. Thanks for the help guys.

[blurchy]

Satis

(which I checked in my DVD player, it runs fine),

dont give up dude see if there is a way
to run the mpg that you copied
off the cd through your dvd player

it does sound like the dvd program has the ability
to run the file while windows hasnt
i have to say at a guess its the
mpg2 codec but like i said it is a guess

i must admit most of this is beyond me
my brother has done svcds before
a good program for splitting and doing just
about anything is temp eng
ill find out the proper name
of it when he gets in

he got the advice he needed from another
website which has a forum specially dedicated
to cd burning and dvd ripping,encoding
etc etc
you will get the answer here
its more of a specialised
computer bod place :)

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/message.htm


also one of the sites he used for info was

http://www.vcdhelp.com

lemme know what happens

i could always ask me brother see if he knows anything

[satis]

hey, I'm not giving up quite yet. :) I'm giving up on the SVCD mpeg, though...I'm gonna see if I can figure out a way to rip an AVI directly off a VOB file.

Now that you said it, you may be right about the mpeg2 codec being messed up...but then again, it rips it from VOB to AVI to MPG2 to CD image without a problem...the resultant CDs are fine. I don't get it. Well, not giving up, no worries. Maybe the svcd stream is just too much for my system to handle.

I have TMPGenc (I believe that's what it's called), it's part of the DVD2SVCD bundle. I messed with that some, but the most I could accomplish was splitting the svcd mpg into m2v and audio streams, which did me no good. :) I'll keep trying.

[satis]

...but I thought I'd let you know I've resolved the laggy video problem. I did some more exploring of my DVD ripper software and figured out how to rip to mpeg1 (rather than Mpeg2). Now I can encode video without any lagginess. Unfortuanetly, Pinnacle doesn't appear to like mpeg1 sound. :) It encodes any resultant AVIs or MPegs with no sound at all, though the source file definetely does have sound. Ah well...I figure I'll find some way to reencode my mpeg1 to some other format (avi or something) and then try running from that.

[blurchy]

no ya not boring me its just a bit beyone me
is all glad to hear youve solved part of the problem

it doesnt record the mpegs sound
sounds odd you have got the

include audio tick box ticked ?
u probably have but thought id mention it anyway :)

[satis]

yep, I've got that checked. First time I went through, I didn't (shame on me) but I always quadruple-check everything before asking for help. :P Thanks though, it would suck if it was something that harebrained. heheh.

[tenndevil]

I use pinnacle 8 for all the editing, but I do not use it for converting to mpeg2, I just don't believe it does a good enough job of converting. I do all my capture and editing with 8, check their forums I guarantee you are not the only one. So far for me the best converter and burning has to be NERO. I also have 1024mb of ram that helps alot because video editing is intensive
as we are all aware.

[satis]

yea, I'm just trying to use it to edit up some video clips. I'm not too fond of Adobe. Plus Adobe wouldn't read mpeg2. Blah, I've pretty much retired this idea for the time being anyway. Thanks for the interest. :P I'll probably come back to it in the future sometime.