title sequence for birthday video complete..

Between writing doc to help myself and others on the Cinelerra list, I've finally produced some usable output. Check out my birthday video intro titles:
1.5MB

This is an mpeg4 quicktime vid. Mplayer/Xine should play it fine.

Quicktime for Linux compatibility chart

I spent Sunday afternoon and evening creating this compatibility chart for QT for Linux formatted files exported from Cinelerra. There are many compression schemes that can be used within this file format and I did not have a list to tell me what scheme works and what doesn't in Cinelerra and some default media players like Mplayer, Quicktime for Win and Windows Media Player 10. Hence the guide.

Enjoy!
html format
open office calc format

a foul up

Last night, I encoded my first full length video podcast as a Quicktime from Cinelerra. I brought it into iTunes and used the 'Convert Selection for iPod' feature and it spent all night (from 11pm to 11am) converting. The .MOV file specs were pretty heavy:
- 50 minutes long
- 720x404 resolution
- 524MB

I used a PIII, 1.5Ghz laptop w/512MB of memory to do the conversion, hence the slowness. Once the file was converted, both audio and video tracks played back! Hooray! This was a lot better than my previous result wherein the audio was gone. So, I found the new .M4V file on the filesystem and looked at the metadata in the properties. I saw that there was no metadata, so not thinking that it could have a deleterious effect on the file, I added the missing metadata to the file as it existed on XP. Bad, nary I say REAL bad idea!

After adding the metadata to the file, the .M4V would no longer play in iTunes (6.0.4) or Quicktime. To put it politely..RATS!! I tried removing the metadata, but no go..the file still would not play. So, the twelve hours I spent converting the video was all for naught, cause now I have to do it all again. Wunnerful.

Let me be clear though..
1) you CAN edit the metadata for an iTunes video podcast within iTunes
2) you CANNOT edit the metadata for an iTunes video podcast in the filesystem. This will break the audio for the podcast.

This being the case, I decided to move my website over to my audio workstation in order to allow me to use my main video editing workstation to do the iTunes conversion. Screw the portable..conversion took way too long there. Copying the website from the video editing box to the audio workstation would allow me to use either of my primary machines to serve web content depending on which one I was using at the time. Both are dual boot setups, XP or Win2K and Fedora Core 4, so at least now I have flexibility. Of course, I wish it was under different circumstances that I make that improvement to my workstation setup. Argh.

So now the file is converting on my P4, 3.2Ghz, 1GB box. I'm hoping to get at least a 3x improvement in conversion time. So, I'm looking at 5pm today for the file to be done. 1-5pm..4hrs. Yeesh. I need a faster box..ain't it always the case!

UPDATE: Good news! It only took two hours to convert the file..sweet! I think the remarkable improvement may be bolstered by the MPEG compression available in my All-in-Wonder 9800 Pro video card. I should switch video cards and try this to verify..

Other things of note I'd like to get done:
- setup RSS feed for newly created video
- update Beginner's Guide for bitrate calculation/QT M4V metadata warning
- change rendering partition to ext2 (non-journaling file system)
- eventually get RAID0 back up and running for rendering partition

At least my cam should be coming back from the shop this week!

problem rendering files with custom resolutions

Last night, I exported an MPG stream and put it into iTunes. The MPG in iTunes plays just fine. When I converted it using iTunes, though, the resulting file had no sound. What is going on here? If I use the Cinelerra standard YUV4MPEG pipe, with -target DVD, the video renders fine and comes back into Cinelerra in its' entirety. But when I use a custom resolution size (480x320), the video track gets truncated shorter than the audio track when I reimport the rendered MPEG back into Cinelerra. So something is definetly wrong about how Cinelerra is rendering files with custom resolutions. I guess I'm going to have to enter a bug because no one seems to be responding to my posts on cvs.cinelerra.org.

Tonight, I'm rendering the file as MOV and hopefully that will solve my issues. Of course, this is all extra work, because my original intent is to do all of this within Cinelerra, instead of having to go out.

More evidence of strangeness is that even though xine and mplayer played the MPG, ffplay played the video stream, but there was no audio. That may be telling me something.