I am fairly new to VCD creation. I am using a Sony Digital 8 camcorder, a Dell 800 mhz PIII, 128mb RAM, and a firewire card. I am converting my home movies to AVI with Videowave III, editing them, converting to MPEG with TMPEG, and buring with NERO. The quality is not bad, but when I download my video into Videowave it cuts off my download at about the 9 minute mark saying there is not enough memory. I know I have plenty of hard drive space and if I break my video down to 3 or 4 eight minute clips and then cut them together there is no problem. How can I convert an hour of tape without breaking it up? Thanks for the help.

-- Rob Compton (rkc73@aol.com), January 31, 2001

Answers

Although you may be able to create an AVI file that is larger, you will not be able to play or process any AVI larger than 2GB in size. This is a limitation of Windows. See Microsoft Technet article # Q193656.

-Wayne

-- Wayne Witgenstein (witgenstein@bellsouth.net), January 31, 2001.

You do not say what system your using, W98SE I run has a 4G limit.

You have an option to use Avisynth as a feeder to the TMPGEnc build 12a or 12b encoder for standard vcd's, refer my web site which is for firewire based VCD's and DVD.

http://www.geocities.com/aussie01au/

You can use any number of avi's, even at 2G each and seamlessly joint the files in TMPGEnc - just go read about it.

-- Ross mcl (rmclennan@esc.net.au), January 31, 2001.

You can't convert an hour of tape without breaking it up; one of the best ways of joining clips as fluidly and as smoothly as possible that I use is opening these clips in Premiere5.1c, editing them to the precise frame, then encoding the timeline contents with Panasonic 2.5 plug-in. Depending on the PC/particular OS, etc. Premiere will allow either 2GB or 1GB max filesize for any clip you intend to put on the timeline. I note the time it takes to make 2GB; for DV-1 AVI this is about 9mins, and I capture extra frames before and after so I have something to trim in Premiere with exactly. One disadvantage here is unless you use the latest Premiere 6 the kind of DV AVI files you transferred from your camcorder to your HDD is type 1 and 5.1 doesn't recognize it. You have to convert it to type 2 beforehand. How to do that is another topic. I suppose you can say here Premiere is then like a frameserver for the Panasonic, in the same way Ross says about the AVISynth is for the TMPGenc. Encoding with TMPGenc is great; what I do not like is the artifacts, albeit minor, that it introduces at the join. One such is a "peep" sound that is not heard unless the audio volume at the join is very low or is silent. There is also a tendency for video to momentarily severely pixelate for a few frames after the join, strangely not evident on playing the joined clip on the PC, but is seen when playing the resulting VCD on the set-top. At least TMPGenc uses all frames presented to it; VCDCutter which can also join MPEG clips doesn't introduce artifacts, but cuts off frames so the end of the preceding clip and the beginning of the next corresponds to complete GOPs. Therefore if you are one frame short of a 15-frame GOP VCDCutter throws away 14 frames and the unintended jump at the join is not what you planned and is often startling. If you are going to pursue this area more seriously I suggest moving up from VideoWave III to Premiere 6.

-- Mehmet Tekdemir (turk690@yahoo.com), February 01, 2001.

There is a 2Gb limit on avi files, but there is a 4 GB limit on any file if you are usig FAT 32, you can have bigger files than 4 GB in NTFS.

-- Joe (im_joe@mailplanet.net), February 02, 2001.