DVDate
Paul's website is pretty thorough. I'll go over some
of the features of DVDate, looking at it from the perspective of a Movie
Maker user.
Convert DV-AVI type 1 to 2, or vice
versa
Conversions in either direction worked fine. Movie Maker 2
saves as type 1, but type 2 is needed by some software such as
Pinnacle Studio.
Convert a non-DV file into
a DV file (Pal or NTSC)
Assuming this means avi files as inputs, it still didn't
work for me.
- It seemed to convert a raw Bitmap AVI (that's what GSpot told me it
was) but the new file didn't show in WMP.... I heard the audio
but didn't see the visual
- Conversion of an AVI file compressed with the Cinepak codec
played in WMP but hung DVDate at the 0% progress point... maybe I needed
to give it more time.
Convert a DV file from Pal
to NTSC, or vice versa
Conversions worked fine in both directions.
Inlay Datecode or Timecode into the Frames of a
DV File
This is the main purpose of the app. It works well, but not
without a couple unwanted side effects. First note the icon or key to use to
toggle the displayed date/time code on or off in the preview monitor.
Touch the preview screen to position the 'inlay' date/time... or
use the horizontal and vertical sliders. You can select any place on the
window.
Any time there's a video in the monitor, press the space bar
to play or pause it.
Use the menu > Convert > Inlay to kick off the process of
copying the original to a new DV-AVI file with the date/time inlaid. It'll
start the copying as soon as you exit the menu choice.
Use the menu > ? > Settings > Formats tab > Inlay
lines 1 and 2 to get to the settings. Make a note of what the settings are
before you change them, as they are 'sticky' by default, with changes
stored in the computer's registry... even a fresh download of the app
won't get the default settings back. The app includes a feature to erase
the registry entries, but even that doesn't put the settings back to
what they started with in the app. Maybe I didn't try hard
enough.
If you liked the original settings but lost
them, use the ? > Settings > Formats tab and do some tweaking or
learning...
I
tried to get cute and use the date/time inlay feature to embed my
URL... it almost worked... but when it reached the 'h' in my URL, it must have
taken it to be the signal to show the hour.
Don't forget to change a time shift setting back to zero or
it'll effect each of your processed files when you don't want it to.
Ripping the Audio from a DV file to WAV
The feature works well. It's an easy way to get the sound
track over to Audacity for some audio 'fixing'.
Making a Time Shift
I have a DV tape of our visit to the Hearst
Castle in California a few weeks ago... my camcorder time was 3 hours
shifted from Pacific time... give or take another hour for
daylight savings time.
Use the menu > Convert > Fix a
time difference to set the time adjustment... it'll start copying
to the new file as soon as you select OK. The new file
automatically includes a file name suffix indicating
the time shift, a handy feature to help you stay
organized.
DVDate took 22 minutes to copy the full 1 hour 13 GB file to a
new one with the adjusted time.
See the note in the time difference window above... about
it never replacing the true datecode found in the frames. The shift is
for displaying on the video only.
It automatically creates the adjusted
file in the same folder as the original.
Here at the left, I'm in Movie Maker looking at two copies of
a video clip... the clips at the left unadjusted and those on the
right adjusted by 3 hours.
See how Movie Maker uses the same date/time code for
both, illustrating DVDate not changing the info in the file
itself.
DVDate effectively did what it was supposed
to... shifted the time, and displayed it on the video, but with a
couple unwanted side effects.
The new file with
the displayed shifted date code doesn't carry the original
timecode data.... if it does, Movie Maker can't use it. This picture shows
Movie Maker auto-splitting a file into 7 sub-clips from the original,
but attempts to auto-split the newly created one with the overlaid
time/date data didn't work.
If you've already imported and subdivided the original file, you
should be able to replace it with the new file, and let Movie Maker
continue to use the current breakdown.
Scenes File
Note the .scn file that's with the 146_DV.avi file.
It's a 'scenes' file, a list of scenes with embedded
thumbnails. It was created by Paul's DVCassette app when I used it for
the camcorder capture.
The conversion by DVDate to adjust the time didn't
automatically make a new scenes file for it, but it's in sync with the
other app in that it has a feature to make a new one, which works in
DVCassette.
Use the menu > Scenes > Create a Scenes file... it
took 8 minutes to make.
Multimedia Player
DVdate includes an
embedded multimedia player which can read the video (full screen if you
want) and let you easily browse it.
That's why the scenes file comes into play in DVDate. Use
the F8 and F9
keys to step forward or backward one scene at a time... a handy
feature.
Some info from Paul's site: The player shows the datecode
and timecode of the frame being viewed. DVdate also displays complete
information about the AVI file. Like the utility Gspot, it indicates the
codec, the image size, the number of frames per second, the duration of the
video etc..., when dealing with DV files, it adds the type I or II and the TV
standard Pal or NTSC and the aspect ratio 4x3 or 16x9. It features
also a function to display the RIFF header of an avi file, like
riffwalk.exe from Microsoft used to do.
Using the F8 and F9 keys to browse through a full one hour DV
file one scene at a time is really great!! More about the scenes files and
DVCassette in another newsletter someday.
Playlist - Batch Processing
DVDate can load lots of avi files into its
"playlist", and process them individually or as a batch. Using
the CTRL+F7 keys will even load all avi files on all your
hard drives into the playlist.
Adding all the AVI files on my laptop's c drive
resulted in 271 files in the playlist. I started to preview some
of them. I got only a few files into the list when I got this error about
'a must have' encountering a problem. That's a new phrase for me.... I don't
know what a 'must have' is.
The video file happened to be a Divx encoded one. I tried it in
WMP and it crashed that too. The event viewer didn't have an entry for the
'must have' crash in DVDate, but it had one for WMP.... shown at the
right.
GSpot said the file had problems... I considered
it a bad file rather than an issue with DVDate.
When you use entry level video apps such as Movie Maker, you
often, or at least sometimes, want to do a specialized task with
another tool. One of them is displaying the date and
time info from a DV-AVI file on the video itself.
DVDate is a tool that does it...
and more. 
I was tempted, but refrained from expanding this
newsletter to include the other apps... I'd rather do one in more
depth than a bunch in a shallow way.
