audio track gone and can not be added with .avi file..

stormy1777 · Post by **stormy1777** » Fri Jun 09, 2006 9:29 am

I have a nice fancy project.. 1 single .AVI about 1 hour long with 30 carefully placed chapters with images, on menus, the whole thing.. all is OK.. until suddenly, the AUDIO track is not playing...

I check the audio tab on that single avi clip, and it's gone! (I didn't delete it!!) I try to add it clicking the Note+ icon, and I point to the AVI file but get:

Code: Select all

Unable to open file  
[s:\capture\proj524\puzzle.avi]

File format mismatch.

[16801:5:1]  OK

now.. I lost my audio track to all my 1 hour video!! if I add that video clip again to the project then it plays ok and in the audio tab I see that .avi name.. Is there a way to force adding that .avi as the audio track???

starting from scratch is SOO painful.. here's another example of an annoying bug.. please, anyone with ideas.. save me

Devil · Post by **Devil** » Fri Jun 09, 2006 9:47 am

Have you tries taking the AVI file into an editor, splitting that audio from the video and creating a WAV file from the audio?

In all probability, the audio may be corrupt, possibly due to containing some badly compressed material, such as mp3.

It would help if you told us what format your avi file is in and the way you made it.

sjj1805 · Post by **sjj1805** » Fri Jun 09, 2006 9:47 am

I know this might sound puzzling but there isn't actually such a thing as an avi file!

Several video formats use the avi file extension which translates into
Audio Video Interleaved. Uncompressed video would gobble up some 65 GB of hard drive space every hour.

So the boffins devised methods of compression to reduce the enormous file size and came up with things called CODECs.
CODEC = COmpression / DECompression.

There are several possibly runing into a hundred or more of these CODECs and some are better than others.

Three of the popular codecs in curent use provide a lot of headaches for people who do Video Editing and DVD authoring, they are:

DivX
Xvid
MPEG4

They are highly compressed but retain high quality and so are very popular methods of sharing video over the internet. Some camcorders are also recording to this format.

The experience of various users of this forum has shown that it is better to convert the above 3 formats into something more traditional beforehand.

For editing purposes the DV format is recommended. This requires about 13GB per hour.

All forms of video will require conversion to MPEG2 format to be able to create a DVD. This format is not generally considered as suitable for editing and so becomes the last step before Authoring a DVD.

There are free converters available including at least one listed in our links to free stuff:
http://phpbb.ulead.com.tw/EN/viewtopic.php?t=12931

stormy1777 · Post by **stormy1777** » Fri Jun 09, 2006 10:09 am

sjj1805, at this point technicality and phylosophy is not anything I care about much.. avi or not, the problem still exists.. or are you suggesting i rename my "avi" to "mpg" and it will magically work? well.. i tried it, and it doesn't work.

The AVI file is OpenDML, 25frame/sec Huffyuv v2.1.1 768x576 with 149000 frames taking about 50GB capture from old vhs tape.. it's completely VALID non-corrupt, read only AVI, that works just fine.. something in WS2 went crazy, not sure why..

audio is PCM 44.1 8bit mono. it's low quality on purpose due to source limitation.

yeah, splitting audio is an option.. the thing that gets me is with WS2 it's always many many workaround , that take a long long time..

anyways, I edited the .dws project file and changed the audio stream to point to the .AVI file and it's working partially, it plays my audio but track length is picked up by the dummy .mp3 I placed there.. silly software doesn't read the length when it opens the file.. it's stashed somewhere else..

ok, seems like i have NO choice, either recreate all the menus/chapters, or split the audio..

thanks for the ideas welcome others, will post if I find anything magical.

sjj1805 · Post by **sjj1805** » Fri Jun 09, 2006 10:15 am

stormy1777 wrote:sjj1805, at this point technicality and phylosophy is not anything I care about much.. avi or not, the problem still exists.. or are you suggesting i rename my "avi" to "mpg" and it will magically work? well.. i tried it, and it doesn't work.

No. You have to convert it. Simply changing the name of the file extension doesn't transform it into something else.

Its buckets and spades. Calling a Bucket a spade doesn't make it a spade.

stormy1777 · Post by **stormy1777** » Fri Jun 09, 2006 10:33 am

fine, used virtualdub to extract the unmodified audio stream as a .wav file..

I'm still buffled as to why it suddenly stopped working, I mean the .avi was attached as the audio stream for weeks now, all of the sudden it just droped with no way to add..

at any rate, now I added the .wav and I have sound.. hope it's synchronized..

it's just puzzling that this is such old software and they dont refresh it.. I have a theory.. ok, I'll post it on the WS3 thread. thanks.

Devil · Post by **Devil** » Fri Jun 09, 2006 11:05 am

OK, you don't like philosophy or technicalities. How about pragmatism? If you are capturing from VHS, it is quasi-ridiculous to use a format that can resolve more than two times the amount of data than you are feeding into it.

Do you know what the best VHS resolution is? Let me tell you, it is about 180 line pairs = 360 pixels, yet you use resources up to 768 pixels. This is cracking an egg with a steam hammer. And the egg gets flattened, squashed flat, because you are capturing noise which has a higher spatial resolution, often 1 pixel wide, than your signal.

I recently bought some commercial DVDs of some old films. At least one of them was captured from VHS because I know the negative and the only known print were destroyed in a fire about 20 years ago and the only copies in existence were in VHS. Out of curiosity, I checked and found all these films were recorded on the DVDs at 352x278 yet the video quality was good (some had sound problems), considering some of the originals were older than I and I was born nearly ¾ of a century ago.

OK, it may not be pragmatic to capture at 352 x 288 but you could use a compression system that smoothed over some of the noise, along with interleaved audio. My personal choice is to convert analogue from VHS tapes to DV type 1 at 13 Gb/h. This would be about 21½ Gb for your project, less than half your current file size. I can promise you that you will have much less hassle and a quality every bit as good and, as the audio in DV1 is interleaved, no issues on that score. I could almost give you a written guarantee that it would work first time!

I hope that the conversion to WAV has worked for you but, next time, you may wish to opt for a simpler way of doing things. As I've often said, you can be more royalist than the king; I prefer pragmatism.

Jethro · Post by **Jethro** » Fri Jul 07, 2006 7:02 pm

Greetings:

I have just joined this form and noticed this thread. Here's my experience:

I use Magix Movie Edit Pro to edit my movies and when I am done, I get Magix to render it into one gigantic DV/AVI file - about 13.5 GBytes per hour as Devil pointed out.

I know that this DV/AVI file has audio in it. If I double click on it, RealPlayer pops up and loads it and the video plays and the audio is there too. Likewise, Windows Media Player has no trouble with it either.

I load this DV/AVI file into DWS to create menus. The audio appears to be ignored. Even if I try to play it from within the DWS editor. There's no audio. So, I go back to Magix Movie Edit Pro and get it to render the audio as a separate WAV file. I then import this into DWS project as an audio overlay that is exactly the same size (in terms of time) as the video. This seems to work fine.

I agree that it is a rather annoying work-around and I would prefer NOT to have to do this but I like the DVD menu editor and the final result is always very clean and sharp video.

Cheers,
Mark

sjj1805 · Post by **sjj1805** » Fri Jul 07, 2006 7:23 pm

Your workflow is wrong. You edit the AVI files but you render them to MPEG2 and then pass the MPEG2 to DVD Workshop (or any other DVD authoring tool) otherwise you end up rendering twice.

Jethro · Post by **Jethro** » Fri Jul 07, 2006 8:05 pm

Hi:
I'm a littel confused - not that well informed on my formats.

In Magix Movie Edit Pro, when I transfer video from my camera using this application, I believe that it is stored as DV/AVI and when I "render", the output format is also DV/AVI. The reason that I think this is that when I am "rendering" (perhaps that is not the correct word), any portion of my video that does NOT contain added text, video processing or transition effects from one scene to another is simply copied, as is, from the raw video to the final video stream with no alteration. This is how it is explained in the manual. In fact, if you sit and watch as it renders, the process is extremely fast if there are no transistion effects, processing or text superimposed onto the video. If there are any effects or additions that would alter the raw video source for whatever reason, then, understandably, the process takes longer. Also, the raw video loaded from my camera occupies about 13GB for each hour and so does the output DV/AVI.

So, my impression always was that when I "rendered" with Magix Movie Edit Pro, all I was doing was merging the video stream from the raw video loaded from my camcorder with any text or sub-titles, processing any portions where I have specified gamma correction or whatever and of course mixing video where transistion effects were specified. When I render to DV/AVI, no options are offered as to resolution or compression rates. I am certain that it is simply DV/AVI IN and DV/AVI OUT.

Unless I am totally mistaken, I do not believe that the "rendering" process performed by Magix Movie Edit Pro is a wasted or redundant step. Also, in the past I have used Movie Edit Pro to author my DVD menus and to burn my DVD's. I did not like the DVD menu editor and I was appalled with the resulting video quality. If I use Magix to produce my MPEG2 files, I am afraid that the video quality would suffer. This is what drove me to DWS to do my menu editing and burning in the first place.

Regards,
Mark

sjj1805 · Post by **sjj1805** » Fri Jul 07, 2006 8:27 pm

A quick tutorial on formats and rendering:

The material in your camcorder is DV (avi) and you transfer it to your hard drive - still in avi.

You now do all your editing - cuts, transitions, titles etc.
What you do next depends upon what you are going to do with the video.

1. Return it to the camcorder (in DV)
2. Place it onto a website (WMF / MPEG4 / Xvid / DivX)
3. Create a Video DVD (MPEG2)

A normal Video DVD that plays in your standalone DVD player is made up of VOB files. In fact those VOB files are MPEG2 files.

Every time you 'render' (in otherwise create) a video you lose some quality. Therefore it is better to render Once. Choose your required format and render accordingly.

Smart Render.
If the final format is the same as the format you are currently working with then smart render will only 'render' the parts that have changed, everything else will 'stream copy.'

This applies to whatever software program you are using because we are dealing here with video formats and not video editing programs.

For more in depth information please view this article:
From Camcorder to DVD

skier-hughes · Post by **skier-hughes** » Sat Jul 08, 2006 12:29 pm

Steve,
I believe the jethro is talking about the rendering of the dv-avi file in the editing app, where some need to do this on transitions/titles etc before export. The app will then save as dv-avi.
Some apps can do this on the fly, some have to render before showing a preview and they make tempoary files which the pc uses to show the end result.
Premiere which I use does this in it's normal state, whereas I have a canopus card which allows premiere to work in real time and omits the render stage.

It is different to the encoding which you are speaking about.