[baadil]

Hi,

I am capturing video from my DV Cam using Firewire and Adobe Premiere Pro. All looks good and video comes out great. As you can imagine, DV AVI get captured at about 10-12 GB per one hour of video.

After I do some basic editing such as deleting some scenes, adding titles, rearranging clips etc, I am trying to export the whole video to Mpeg. I have tried XVid and DivX Codec for export. XVid took nearly 20 hours to encode on my dual core PC with 2GB RAM. Resulting video was a bit strange.

Source was 16:9 ratio and I selected the same for output. My resulting videos would play as 16:9 using Nero Media Player but Windows Media Player cropped it to a square screen. Also, my output files was almost 5 GB.

My questions are:
- Why would one player show it as 16:9 while other would show it as square ratio? My other videos play fine in both players as 16:9.
- Is there a way to reduce conversion time? I have tons of DV tapes I would like to capture but at this rate, I will be sitting here until eternity.
- How do I reduce the file size further? I see people taking a DVD (4.5 GB) and shrinking it to a 700MB CD and come out with excellent quality as well.

Thank you for your help.

[baadil]

Bump... Guys any help?

Thanks.

[rogs]

Try exporting from Premiere as DV, and use something else to convert to Xvid

Try the free program Virtualdub for example. You can select the parameters in the Xvid output, so you can try various qualities, and see what file size/quality balance suits you best. (Try a small file first - saves encoding the whole lot only to discover it's too big a file or too poor quality!).
Virtualdub can take a bit of effort to learn at first, but there are tutorials out there for it, and it is an excellent program for transcoding, once you're into it.

Shouldn't take 20 hours to encode one hour of Xvid on a duo core!

Regading the 16:9 business. Unfortunately not all players see the 16:9 'flag' set in the encoding software.

With an mp4 file, like xvid, you can change the aspect ratio flag with the freebie program MPEG4 Modifier.