VideoFactory

[AlChuck]

This question maybe doesn't really belong in a Home Recording forum, but what the hell...

Based on my positive experiences with various versions of Sound Forge XP and ACID Pro 2.0, I bought Sonic Foundry's VideoFactory in January after getting a Sony DV camera around Christmastime.

So far I've been a bit disappointed and mystified, and technical support has been nonexistant. (Amusingly, after about 6 weeks I got a reply a week ago apologizing for the long delay and giving a "major product release" as the excuse, and the guy asked if I still needed help and to reply to let him know. I said "I sure do still need help" and have not heard back yet...)

Anyway, my current confusion has to do with opening video files and breaking them into pieces. I have a couple of files of captured digital video in AVI format, and I wasn't really thinking and they are all sort of random sizes. Most, alas, are bigger than 650 MB, so I can't store them on CD-Rs. It occured to me that I could open one of these AVI files, cut off the last half, and save it as another file; similarly save the last half by removing the first half. Seems straightforward -- I do it with WAV files all the time.

So when I do this in VideoFactory, it takes forever. It's as if it has to rerender the truncated file to a different format. I set the video portion to be saved at the same resolution as the original file, but I was stuck with the choice of only 8 bit or 16 bit for the audio data. (The camera captured the audio at 12 bit resolution.)

OK, I can see how this might take a little time, resampling the audio portion of the data and reassembling the file.

Problem is, it takes like forever, nearly always crashed before it's done, and when I do get a file it's enormous, like 5 times the size of the original captured AVI (4 GB), rather than something like half the size. Sure, 16-bit stereo audio data takes more space than 12-bit audio data, but 5 times? Something screwy here.

I tried also rendering a 5-minute portion of one file to a Quicktime movie... the estimated time said 4 hrs... I bailed.

I also took a Quicktime movie that is about 1 minute long abd tried to render it to an AVI file. It took something like 15-20 minutes and when it was done, the AVI is screwy -- the video portion seems to show only the initial frame and the audio is all broken up -- stops and starts, etc.

Any clues, anyone? My system has a 700 MHz PIII and 256 MB RAM -- should be able to handle it.

Also, anyone know of any video editing tools that would allow me to just cut my long AVIs into sub-650 MB pieces so I can at least get 'em off the hard drive and onto CD-Rs for the time being?

Thanks...

-AlChuck

 

[Eddie N]

are you rendering the outputted file with the ntsc dv template??? you should be able to do this with minimal hassle... ive done it plenty of times with the vegas software... check sonic foundrys website for updates of the product...some of the earlier versions of vegas video and video factory had a few issues...

other than that , just open the file , cut it in half , then render the file using the ntsc dv template..it shouldnt take long since the file is already rendered with those settings upon capture...

as far as rendering an avi from a quicktime file goes , if the frame rate is low (15 fps) and/or the resolution is low (320x240) the resulting output is gonna suck...

- eddie -

 

[AlChuck]

are you rendering the outputted file with the ntsc dv template??? you should be able to do this with minimal hassle... ive done it plenty of times with the vegas software... check sonic foundrys website for updates of the product...some of the earlier versions of vegas video and video factory had a few issues...
other than that , just open the file , cut it in half , then render the file using the ntsc dv template..it shouldnt take long since the file is already rendered with those settings upon capture... ...

But that's what I tried to do. I used the default template. As far as I could tell the only difference was that the audio data was in 12 bit in the capture and I had only the choice of 8 or 16 bit in the output. How long do these things take to render, anyway?

as far as rendering an avi from a quicktime file goes , if the frame rate is low (15 fps) and/or the resolution is low (320x240) the resulting output is gonna suck...

I know, that doesn't matter, I just wanted to work with a voiceover on my PC using either VideoFactory or Cakewalk, then bring it to school, where they have a Mac.

 

[AlChuck]

Turns out I was not paying enough attention. The default template I thought I was using sid "uncompressed." When I tried the NTSC DVD template, everything works fine.

I do have a remaining problem though -- I can't get it to render to Quicktime. The progress bar stays at zero and all that ever happens is the time elapsed acculmulates and the estimated time remaining keeps climbing up to 24:59:59 and then starts over again... when I Cancel it hangs. I suspect that Quicktime is oddly set up on my system, though, as I still have a control panel for an old version in the Control Panel (along with the new one).

 

[Eddie N]

you need to download the "full" version of quicktime...the one with the developer tools... otherwise you wont be ablbe to render to quicktime... try that and let me know what happens..

- eddie -

 

[AlChuck]

Yup, I did that, but have I tried it again? No... all I tried was to open one of my AVIs in Quicktime and it hung... I'll give it a look now...

And another thing -- I downloaded and installed the Ligo MPEG plug-in from the Sonic Foundry website but it doesn't appear in the file types list like it's supposed to...

Thanks again!

 

[AlChuck]

Awwwwright! It works now! Progress bar slides over and I get a mov file at the end...

Now all I have to do is solve my MPEG issue and I'll truly have a Video Factory on my computer...