[gee308]

Hi, I'm learning to make VCDs and I am using imovie to convert my DV streams to mov and rthen I conver tit later for VCDs. Is there anyway I can use my computer while imovie is exporting my DV streams to mov? It is really annoying to not be able to at least do more researching on the net while it is exporting. Or is this a real basic thing to do and I just missed it? Are there other programs that I can use that are fairly cheap/free to convert DV streams to another format? I have all the DV streams saved on my firewire disk already. TIA

[lucylawless]

well,
Quicktime Pro can open DV streams and Export them to another format, or save them as a quicktime movie (options include self-contained, or reference, which would mean you don't have to wait at all). But I don't see what you could do with a QT movie that you couldn't do with a DV stream. are we talking about FFmpegX? Anyway, if you don't want to pay the $30 for QTPro (worth it in my opinion, it will let you cut out commercials, too, among many many many other things), you can find free utilities that include the basic function of opening a movie that quicktime can play (avi, mpeg, DV stream, mp3, mp4, jpg, tiff, txt, etc) and save it as a quicktime movie. The only ones I can think of off the top of my head are the ones I wrote
sync-hole
metadata hootenanny
in either one, just open your DV streams or drag them onto the app's window or icon, and then File->Save. Make sure to select Reference Movie in the preferences (or the Save As dialog in the case of the second program). Oops, both of those are OS X only. What version of MacOS are you in?

You should be able to switch out of iMovie while it's rendering with Command-Tab or some other trick, if you want to edit in iMovie first.

[gee308]

Originally posted by lucylawless:
well,
Quicktime Pro can open DV streams and Export them to another format, or save them as a quicktime movie (options include self-contained, or reference, which would mean you don't have to wait at all). But I don't see what you could do with a QT movie that you couldn't do with a DV stream. are we talking about FFmpegX? Anyway, if you don't want to pay the $30 for QTPro (worth it in my opinion, it will let you cut out commercials, too, among many many many other things), you can find free utilities that include the basic function of opening a movie that quicktime can play (avi, mpeg, DV stream, mp3, mp4, jpg, tiff, txt, etc) and save it as a quicktime movie. The only ones I can think of off the top of my head are the ones I wrote
sync-hole
metadata hootenanny
in either one, just open your DV streams or drag them onto the app's window or icon, and then File->Save. Make sure to select Reference Movie in the preferences (or the Save As dialog in the case of the second program). Oops, both of those are OS X only. What version of MacOS are you in?

You should be able to switch out of iMovie while it's rendering with Command-Tab or some other trick, if you want to edit in iMovie first.

Yeah, I am using FFmpegX. I am having problems using it. I can't remeber which exact setting I used, but out of all the encodings I ran from FFmpegX, I only got one to complete. It keeps segfaulting:
sh: line 1: 11375 Segmentation fault /Applications/ffmpegX.app//Contents/Resources/ffmpeg -i /Users/toyboy/Desktop/optimized/toisan-HQ.mov -y -vn -f mp2 -acodec mp2 -ab 224 -ar 44100 -ac 2 -map 1.1:0.0 /Users/toyboy/Desktop/optimized/raw/toisan-HQ.mpg.mp2

I know I can get it to work because it worked once, but that time I didn't export from imovie with high settings so the ffmpeg product had lots of artifacts.
.Also what I notices about FFmpegX is that I can only encode mov files that were saved at the highest setting or else it will come out like crap and have wierd artifacts. This is a problem because some of the VCDs I am trying to make will be about 50 mins and if exporting at highest settings, it is the exact same thing as the raw DV files.

When I command-tab out of imovie, I can use other programs, but then imovie wont continue the export, it will wait until I put that program back to the front.
I'll give your programs a try. One reason why I wanted to try to get imovie to run in the background was also because imovie could piece the DV movies together as one big movie, meaning I have about 20 clips and I wanted them to play side by side and export as one big movie. I think FFmpegX is the best way to go becuase I don't want to spend too much money. I tried using toast off limewire, but the serials were all mesed up, and so I decided to just use the open-source stuff. Thanks for your input. I think someone(maybe myself) should put all this stuff together in some sort of manual. I looked on the net and most of the VCD stuff is for OS 9 and I'm sure a lot of people are also afraid of or don't know how to use the unix/linux tools like ffmpeg.

[gee308]

oh yeah, I'm in 10.2.2 on a tibook 667 vga

[lucylawless]

quicktime pro would also allow you to join your movies together.

if ffmpegX is giving you trouble, have a look at MissingMPEGTools and Mediapipe (also free)

[gee308]

Originally posted by lucylawless:
quicktime pro would also allow you to join your movies together.

if ffmpegX is giving you trouble, have a look at MissingMPEGTools and Mediapipe (also free)

What setting do you export your movies from imovie in? I figured out the segfaulting error. If I export with the CD preset in imovie, FFmpegX will encode without failures, but the movie will have those unsuable artifacts. But if I export with the highest setting, FFmpegX will segfault.
TIA

[gee308]

to fix the problem, I did a custom export setting. I exported with the highest quality video, and the problem was with the audio. I encoded the audio as
IMA 4:1
Now that I have the files I want to burn from ffmpeg done. Which files do I need to use with toast exactly? Here is the list of files I got out for the SVCD preset in FFmpegX:
oisan-1_01.img
oisan-1_02.img
oisan-1.mpg
oisan-2_01.img
oisan-2_02.img
oisan-2.mpg
oisan-3_01.img
oisan-3_02.img
oisan-3.mpg
oisan.m2v
oisan.mp2
oisan.mpg