Last ditch effort before I uninstall

[Sadie]

Thanks to all you good people who have written such informative posts and tutorials. I've literally spent hours on end for the past week or two reading this forum. However, I find myself at my wits end.

I've taken every piece of advice I found on here, walked through each and every tutorial. Still, my capture problems never ceased. Finally, I captured my video in the Movie wizard, and then imported it to VS 10.
That seemed to work well.

Quite a few system crashes ensued while editing. But I persisted, saving every time I made a change.

Now it comes to rendering/saving the video, and every time I attempt to do this, it crashes yet again and I get the ever-common Ulead crash error message.

I am not trying to make a dvd. I'm just trying to save my video to upload to the internet. I've done all of this work, and now I have no video outside of the movie project. I've tried saving in MPEG, WMA, etc etc ad infinitum. But it crashes each and every time.

My project settings are all in avi, per someone's tutorial on this very site.

I have 120 GB of free space on my drive.
I'm running on an Intel Pentium 4 1.50 GHz
I have 512 MB of Ram.

I have spent days and days studying, and now three days simply trying to make a 5 minute video. Now it is finally a finished project, but I can't save it, therefore I can't use it. Ironically, if I had used the archaic and limited Windows Movie Maker, I'd have been finished within an hour of beginning this project.

If someone could throw me a lifeline, I'd appreciate it.
Otherwise, this program is going down for the last time.

[DVDDoug]

I've tried saving in MPEG, WMA, etc etc ad infinitum. But it crashes each and every time.

What was the format that you imported? Where did it come from?

This can sometimes happen with corrupted video files, and the more compressed the format, the more likely you are to have trouble. It can be hard to tell, because sometimes a corrupted file will play back OK but cause trouble when you try to re-code or re-multiplex it. And, I've sometimes had MPEGs get corrupted during the editing process.

My project settings are all in avi...

AVI dows not tell the whole story. AVI is a "wrapper" or "container" format, and it can contain DV, MPEG, DivS, etc. AVI/DV is the least compressed, and it causes the least trouble. And, it may not matter what your "project settings" are, if you import a DivX file and save it in WMV.

[Black Lab]

Please tell us how you got your footage from your camera to your computer - firewire? analog?

Tell us the clip properties - right click a clip and post that info here.

Tell us your project properties - File>Project Properties, and post that info here.

What is your destination format? WMV, because you want it on the Internet?

Please give as many details as possible so we may begin to help you.

[Sadie]

Thank you so much for the timely response.
I apologize for leaving out some necessary details.

I was capturing dv straight from my Canon digital video cam, via firewire.

The project settings were avi/DVD type 1.

After I wrote my original post, I went back to my project on a hunch. Since the saving process seemed to crash at the same place on my video every time, I took a look at those frames. That was an imported clip, not included in the capture process.
That short clip was originally an flv file that I converted to avi using the Riva encoder. I removed that clip. Then I went to Windows Movie Maker and saved the clip as a wmv file, and put it right back into my Ulead project. Then tried to create/save the video once more, expecting the inevitable crash nonetheless.

It seems your advice about corrupt/overcompressed files is extremely accurate, because it WORKED. I have an actual working video now! The save process was crashing because of that

one

little

clip

I had inserted in the middle of my captured footage.
I am extremely relieved, because I've tried every other video editing program except Pinnacle, and I like the interface and ease-of-use of Ulead VS best of all- and by a large margin compared to the rest. Perhaps an uninstall is not in my immediate future after all. Yaaay!

Now back to the forums to try to find my way around having to capture in Movie Wizard first, as well as finding the best format to save in.

Thank you again for responding. I think it's important for others to know that they may have trouble with files that have been converted from .flv
I hope this post can help others

[Sadie]

Please tell us how you got your footage from your camera to your computer - firewire? analog?

Tell us the clip properties - right click a clip and post that info here.

Tell us your project properties - File>Project Properties, and post that info here.

What is your destination format? WMV, because you want it on the Internet?

Please give as many details as possible so we may begin to help you.

I'm sorry, Jeff. I must have been writing my response while you were posting yours. I'm not entirely sure what my destination format will be. The save was successful using WMV 9 for local playback 256 kbps, but I'm going to save it in others now and see the difference in quality.

[sjj1805]

T......Now back to the forums to try to find my way around having to capture in Movie Wizard first, as well as finding the best format to save in......

Please view:
The Capture Stage

[Ken Berry]

And Sadie, don't get too wrought up about using another method to capture your DV. A lot of us here use a variety of programs in any one project. Although I have never had any trouble at all capturing DV (both Type 1 and 2) using Video Studio going back to VS7, these days I more often use the small freeware program WinDV. This is because it is very easy to use, never has any dropped frames and, most importantly to me, allows me to allocate meaningful names to my files instead of the incomprehensible code that Video Studio uses. Then I simply open VS and insert the captured files for editing. The extra minute or two for these processes never worries me, given the many hours I spend on editing and authoring.

How exactly does your problem 'capturing' with VS editor manifest itself? Do you get a message? Does the program see your Canon? (I have a Canon mini DV camera, and it has worked without one failed capture, again since VS7.)

As a matter of personal interest, I for one would also like to know the properties of the new .avi file you created from the .flv one using the Riva Encoder. If you still have the .avi, can you click on it within Video Studio and copy down the properties here please? (I suspect that since, as one of my colleagues has already mentioned, .avi is merely a container format for a variety of other formats, that although you gave your .flv file an .avi extension, in reality it retained its original properties. And VS either could not access or is not compatible with that particular aspect of the Riva encoder...)

[NoM.O]

Like Ken, I would be interested to know the properties of the file converted via the Riva encoder. This thread http://forum.videohelp.com/viewtopic.php?t=259578 from videohelp points toward problems with the files Riva creates, and it would seem VS does indeed have difficulty with some aspect of the conversion process it uses.

If you would still like to use the problematic .flv file (or others at a later stage), this thread may be of interest.http://phpbb.ulead.com.tw/EN/viewtopic. ... highlight=

peace.

[Sadie]

T......Now back to the forums to try to find my way around having to capture in Movie Wizard first, as well as finding the best format to save in......

Please view:
The Capture Stage

Thank you- my setting matched these instructions precisely, but that's probably because I used a tutorial link that one of the members here created

[Sadie]

Wow you folks never cease to amaze. I don't mean to be redundant, but thank you again for taking the time to respond with your suggestions and input. I truly appreciate it!

Ken,
You're right. It really isn't that much of an extra bother to capture using a different method. I might also try your freeware program to do the same, as I agree about the incongruous numbernames that Ulead assigns.

The problem capturing is dropped frames, skipping audio and video. Even when I don't get dropped frames, the playback is choppy and horrid. I do not get any error messages, however. I always play the captured video back both in the project and in a seperate player (Windows Media Player), as I understand that sometime playback in the project is choppy but it can be fine in another player and after saving. But consistently, the playback skips on both.

If I understood your request correctly, you wanted me to right click on the .avi file that was causing the conflict , where it is sitting in the library thumbnails, and copy the properties (correct me if I'm wrong, please). Here's that information:

(By the way, I only cut out 3 seconds of this clip to use in my project)

File name
File format: Microsoft AVI files
File Size: 8,115 KB
Frame rate: 25.000 frames/sec
Duration: 153.600 seconds
Data rate: 51.72 kbps

Video
Compression: ffdshow MPEG-4 Video Decoder
Attributes: 24 bits, 640 X 480
Total frames: 3,840

Audio
Compression: MPEG Audio Layer2
Attributes: 22050 Hz, 56 kbps, Mono
Total samples: 3,389,184 samples

One thing that should have told me there was trouble arising from the .avi clip is that on playing back the project in the preview pane, it always hung for a moment then skipped that clip. When I clicked on it within the project and tried to play just the clip, it would produce no sound. I just assumed it would be fine after it was rendered.

NoM.o,
Thank you very much for those links. I will most certainly check them out

[Ken Berry]

Hmm. The way you describe your captured video it sounds *exactly* as though you are capturing DV using Type 2 Encoder, which produces exactly those sorts of results when the computer concerned does not have sufficient resources. I know you say your project properties were set to Type 1, but that does not necessarily mean that you captured using Type 1. For some curious reason, I have noticed that at least some installations of VS set Type 2 as the default. Can you confirm that when you look in the Capture > Capture Video page and click on the Options cogwheel icon that it is set to Type 1, please. If it isn't, then change it to do so.

Thanks also for the properties of the problem file. It confirms that it is an mpeg-4 file wrapped in an .avi container file. VS10 has its own mpeg-4 codec, but obviously it has problems with files produced using the ffdshow decoder. Although VS10 is rated to work with straight mpeg-4s, and .avi varieties like DivX and XVid, a lot of people report problems when they try using any of these. Throw in one produced with another codec and I suppose trouble could be expected more often than not...

[Sadie]

Yes I thought it was strange to see mpeg-anything when I was writing down the properties for you, but I wouldn't have known what that meant. Learning a lot here!

I absolutely definitely made sure that I was capturing in DV-1 through the capture settings box. I only knew to double check that from reading this forum. It was mentioned in several places that DV-1 is less problematic.

Everything worked well saving it outside of the video editor and then just importing it for editing. But now I've saved the final product in just about every format offered, and none of them are giving me a smooth playback. The only ones that worked were two of the windows video profiles, and although they play smoothly, the quality is very bad. Blurry and pixelated. Any suggestions? I'm saving to a slave drive that I use for storage (don't know if that's relevant).

[Ken Berry]

It depends on how you have the 'slave' (I assume you mean external) drive connected... If it is connected via USB, you would need to be certain that it is USB 2.0. USB 1.0 would simply not be fast enough to keep up with the incoming signal, and you could get the sort of results you mention. If it is connected via Firewire, that should be OK.

[Sadie]

It's connected internally on the slave port

I think I'm going to settle for the best I've found so far, which isn't all that great quality. But at least I can get my video posted and go back to tinkering with the kbps settings, etc until I find a better quality to save by.

Thanks again for all of your help and patience.

Goodnight

[Ken Berry]

Give WinDV a go. It's tiny and free. And above all, it seems to work!! A Google search should find it easily.