Avi chokes VS10

willydeluxe · Post by **willydeluxe** » Wed May 16, 2007 10:47 am

I have a 380Mb clip downloaded from a commercial site that VS10 tells me is an .avi file.

First it takes an age to load into the library, then an age to load into the storyboard.
Playing it as 'clip' works ok, (preview, smooth running etc) but if I pause to make a cut, it takes an age to recover from the pause command, then an age (ok, how long is an age?) .... about 20 seconds to ready the buttons to enable Cut, then even longer before the clip is shown as split into two, and so on.
If I pause the clip I lose the preview: if I frame-jog back or forth it will take an age and I still don't see the preview.

Any ideas please?

heinz-oz · Post by **heinz-oz** » Wed May 16, 2007 1:36 pm

That kind of s**t happens with highly compressed formats like DivX, Xvid, mpg4 and is not a problem of VS but of the very high compression used by these formats. VS has to invent gigabytes of video file from scratch because these formats are not DVD compliant. In case you haven't noticed, how long does this clip of yours play? Consider the duration of a 4.3 GB file at reasonable mpeg2 bitrate settings and you get the idea.

These formats are distribution, worse yet, streaming formats, not meant to be edited.

willydeluxe · Post by **willydeluxe** » Thu May 17, 2007 6:41 pm

Thanks for the info.

DVDDoug · Post by **DVDDoug** » Thu May 17, 2007 7:19 pm

Just to expand on that... "AVI" is not a single format. It is a "container" or "wrapper" format, and it can contain anything from DivX to DV.

For example, AVI/DV files from a MiniDV camera are much less-compressed than most formats at 13GB per hour. AVI/DV files almost never cause any trouble!

You can try using a 3rd-party program such as SUPER (FREE!!!) to convert your files to DVD compatable MPEG-2. You can look at one of the Video Studio Project-Templates to find the settings (resolution, framerate, bitrate, etc) for a DVD compatible MPEG-2 file.

Note that even regular-old MPEG-2 files can occasionally cause trouble when you try to edit or convert them.

SUPER can't convert to DV, but if you search the Net, you should be able to find a program to do that, in case you want to try that solution.