I'm having some technical problems concerning video and I just can't figure it out, so I thought I would get some input here.
All of these videos are 30 seconds in duration. They are basically commercials or "spots" that I built while I worked in production at a local media company.
Some have audio, but most do not. I'll explain this later.
The reason why I need to edit all of these videos is because I'm trying to build a "reel" for a potential job opportunity.
Now, a handful of them were encoded using Scala Designer, which is an animation/layout/script design program which has a main purpose of building and running video/audio scripts - we used it to run our content on the local advertising channel.
Scala encoded these spots as .avi files sans audio - they're all basic animation with little to no actual moving video.
They are large in size with little to no compression, but that's just fine with me. I did that intentionally to maintain as much quality as possible.
Here's the bizarre thing: These files will effectively crash Adobe Premiere and Avid on my system, but they will run in Windows Media Player and Windows Movie Maker. I'm at a loss for this one...
The bottom line is: I don't have any problems with these spots, as I can just build my "reel" in Windows Movie Maker (as corny as that is) and run a music bed behind it.
Here's my problem:
The other spots I have (with audio/voiceover) were built and encoded in Adobe Premiere. These spots actually ran cross channel, which I thought was pretty cool.
They were encoded into an .mpg format, but I can't remember what codec or compression might have been used.
Now, these spots will play flawlessly in Windows Media Player, but they totally crash Premiere, Movie Maker, and Avid (which, again, baffles me). Therefore, I have no way of editing or compiling them, which is what I need to do.
How in the hell can I reformat these particular videos so I can modify them?
I've tried more than one video converter program, but they all show errors or crash.
So far, the only possible solution I have is to set up my Mini DV camcorder in front of the computer monitor, turn off the lights, go full screen and record the spots through the air.
As cheap as that sounds, I'm worried that it may be my only option and I will have to accept the loss in quality.
Any ideas? I need to figure something out by Tuesday.
Zach what are your errors when opening Movie Maker with the Mpeg's? If its not showing anything other than simply disappearing do this... Start>Run> - eventvwr> Applications. There will more than likely be something in there.
I would try AutoGK to convert them to Xvid. It handles about anything. Or if your ambitious, VirtualDubMod will do the same thing, just is a bit more complicated. Both are free.
For figuring out what codec a video used, try GSpot Codec utility.
What is Xvid?
Thanks for the information.
Xvid is a video codec, like DivX, only free and arguably better quality.
I use virtualdub to do most of my video converting and clipping and such things. Try it. Get all the videos under the same format/codec.
I've tried four different kinds of conversion software, as well as importing into three editing suites.
These things are totally screwed. I'm starting to think that there may be some kind of write protection on them, but I've never even heard of such a thing on video files.
Short of running them full screen in a player and somehow capturing the source on an external recording unit, I'm totally out of ideas.
Thanks for the help, though. It looks like I'll just have to get creative with what I've got.
Claude, there was nothing in there that was related to the program crashes. There were only two or three events from the past week, and they had nothing to do with the video editing software.
I use mpeg streamclip for converting and editing on mac. they make a pc ver.
It may help you out in some way
Well....;) :hick:
Finished today by my brother, still needs some details (as you clearly see) and all the junk i have in my room !!!