PapaJohn's Newsletter #36 - Jan 15, 2006

Movie Maker 2 and Photo Story

I've mentioned a number of times that I've been working on the introductory chapter to a book about the world of VirtualDub... and learning much as I go.

VirtualDub has been in my video editing toolbox for a long time. I included it the 'Do Amazing Things' book, and used it to rotate the embedded airplane clip in the video on the main web page for the book's online companion.

In the weekly newsletters it was featured in issue #16, and just last week in issue #35 was one of the apps used to adjust a dark video.

The book work introduced me to more of the VirtualDub world, especially to two related but different apps, VirtualDubMod (VDubMod) and AviSynth... new to me and just added to my toolbox. I'll make one comment about VDubMod in the section with notes, and devote the heart of this issue to AviSynth.

One thing that makes AviSynth different is that, on first glance, it appears to be something only for real geeks who love the hand-coding of things like XML files for transitions and effects. But that's just with a cursory look... when you dig in a bit, you're quickly amazed at what doors you can open with it.

Rehan recommends AviSynth on his site: http://www.rehanfx.org/ as the easiest way to reverse a clip; I agree with him and changed my site the other day to say so... it's method #4 on the page, and is now the preferred one.

In this newsletter I'll cover downloading, installing and using it, and encourage you to adopt it too. It's free from the world of open source software.

• First the comment about VDubMod. It's VirtualDub with lots of extra features. One extra is its ability to Parsing MPEG-2

use MPEG-2 files as inputs, something VirtualDub can't. As I wrote about it for the book chapter, I had to check... yes it opens MPEG-2 files. More than that, I tried opening the VOB files on two different DVDs and saving them to AVI files for use in Movie Maker. Here's how it went:

The first one I tried was a computer-made DVD from someone in California... a Movie Maker movie burned onto a DVD disc by Sonic's MyDVD 4.5, the same app I use. VDubMod took a while to open it... it parses the interleaved MPEG-2 file as it does so (whatever that means). Once opened, I had it save it as an AVI file, choosing the Panasonic DV codec for compression. The rendering went well, and the video and audio in the Panasonic DV-AVI file played fine... and worked as a source file in Movie Maker.

The second disc was a mini-disc my son gave me from his Sony DVD camcorder. This time I got an error message... the Panasonic DV codec couldn't handle it.

I changed the compression setting to try the Microsoft Windows Media Video 9 codec and got another error message, this one pointing to the need for the Windows VCM... that option used to work before my laptop went off to the shop for its new hard drive.

My records show the Windows VCM codec package was released 1-1/2 years ago, and did these two things: (1) Legacy encoding and editing applications can now support the WMV9 codec in file containers such as AVI, (2) WMV 9 content can now reach desktops running Windows Media Player 6.4. Yes, this fits the case. I downloaded the VCM package, installed it again on my laptop, and the encoding went fine (note that aborted the rendering due to time, so I didn't get as far as checking it's playback quality).

So I had gone directly from the VOB files on DVDs to a DV-AVI file in one case and a WMV9 file in another.