Newbie having problems w/VS5 creating simple .mpg files

[TakuSkan]

I'm having a lot of trouble using my old copy of VS5 for the 1st time. I'm hoping someone here may be kind enough to lend a newbie a hand. I’m pasting the specs for my system and VS5 projects below.

I wonder if someone might give me a short list of procedures for capturing video from a VCR, and saving it to an .mpg file to play directly on a PC without doing any further work. I can't really figure out how to finish a VS5 project, and have it create an .mpg file (see below on black playback of cpatured video in storyboard).

The only files I can create are the .mpg files VS5 creates automatically in the project's project folder on the hard drive after doing a simple capture. But the format for those files results in distorted playback in other media players. No matter what settings I set when creating a new project, the resulting captured video file ends up with these attributes:

File Format: MPEG-2
Attributes: 24 Bits, 320 x 480
Frame Rate: 29.970 F/S
Data Rate: 2000 KBPS

That results in the video playback in other players as being distorted, tall and skinny.

I appreciate the procedures written up in the “PLEASE READ..” sticky in this forum, but the menus referred to must be for newer versions of VS, as they aren’t present in my copy of VS5.

Thanks kindly for any feedback.

TakuSkan


----------------

Here's a bit more info on the steps I’ve been following to capture a video clip:

1. Open VisualStudio 5.0
2. On the 'Start' tab, create and name a new project from one of the list of templates.
3. On the 'Capture' tab, click on the 'Video Capture' icon to start recording a few seconds of video, and then click on the 'Video Capture' icon again to stop capture.
4. Click on the video track on the storyboard, and then clicking the 'Play Clip' icon to play the captured video.

The captured video plays fine in VS5, but something is odd. No image appears for the video track frame on the storyboard... it's just solid black. And when I switch to the timeline mode, the 'Video Track' section is just a solid white bar above a solid black bar. And no images are displayed when dragging the timeline triangle icon through the clip. Also, the 'Play Clip' icon is disabled, and clicking on the 'Play Project' icon results in the a black screen after rendering while the playback icon moves through the timeline.

System:

Video card: ATI All-In-Wonder 128 16MB
CPU: Athlon 800 Thunderbird
Memory: 256MB
Operating system: Windows XP Pro SP1

Project attributes (have used similar settings successfully in other apps):

MPEG Files
24 Bits, 352 x 240, 29.97 fps
(Video CD-NTSC)
Video Data Rate 1123 Kbps
Audio Data Rate 224 Kbps
Layer 2, 44.1 kHz, Stereo

MPEG Files
24 Bits, 320 x 240, 29.97 fps
(MPEG-1)
Video Data Rate 1500 Kbps
Audio Data Rate 256 Kbps
Layer 2, 44.1 kHz, Stereo

[JohnG]

Well, 320 x 480 will certainly make for "tall and skinny" :-)

One thought -- have you installed any other video programs since installing VS5? I wonder if some configuration values got mangled. Maybe try re-installing VS5?

hth,
John

[TakuSkan]

One thought -- have you installed any other video programs since installing VS5? I wonder if some configuration values got mangled. Maybe try re-installing VS5?

I did install DivX, and a number of video format conversion apps, but only today. The problem with VS5 was one that pre-existed to the best of my knowledge. However I will give uninstalling and reinstalling it a go.

Do you think the problem of there being no images from the captured video on the timeline is a result of the same problem with the video capture file having odd attributes? It seems odd that no matter what project template I choose, the attributes of the captured video are always the same. Are other people seeing those properties change to reflect the settings for their individal chosen project templates?

TS

[TakuSkan]

Maybe try re-installing VS5?

That was indeed the problem!

But I'm still having problems capturing video. The highest resolution I can get this system to capture is MPEG 320x240 or MPEG VCD 352x240.

This ATI AIW card can do that in real time with it's onboard compression chip using the TV component of the ATI Multimedia Center suite of AV tools. But any attempt at capturing at a higher resolution results in 20-50% of the frames being dropped, and frequently the capture process being suddenly aborted. The resulting files are useless.

I have had a bit more success capturing video with VS5 and it’s software compression at higher resolutions, but not consistently. The whole program will frequently just close during the process of rendering video at higher resolutions, frequently with a popup complaining that one frame is bad.

I don't understand this, as the ATI AIW manual shows a 'compression vs CPU speed' table that indicates that this old Athlon 800 CPU ought to be able to capture the highest possible MPEG and AVI files.

Can anyone tell me if there may be some tweaks I may need to apply in order to get this AIW card compressing video at higher resolution files on my system?

Thanks,

TS