 DivX editing in Vegas - Solved? (I think!)
I have a camera that spits out divx avi onto SD, so I *really really* wanted to be able to edit with divx, especially when shooting interlaced to take advantage of the double frame rate deinterlace trick - rerendering everything out to huff / mjpeg / dv / whatever would take loads more space than the original divx clip plus when I tried it I was getting repeated frames occaisionally ("jitters"). I think it is related to key frames in a temporally compressed MPEG4 or something - every now and then it would show a frame from a couple of frames back, sometimes even one from a second or two ago.
In Vegas, editing with the interlaced divx was a breeze, it worked great, automatically doing the deinterlace trick when you slowed the clip to 0.5 speed. One problem - I would occaisionally get jitters in Vegas too. If I deleted all prerendered files I would not see jitters, but as soon as I prerendered files or rendered out I would see them sometimes. Often in the same place, sometimes it would happen in one render but not the next when you had changed nothing - all very, very odd.
I tried everything, was going mad, but I think I finally stumbled on a solution.
Prerender the video (I was using PAL DV Progressive as my camera spits out 720x576@25FPS with a PAL pixel aspect ratio)
Watch it in Vegas. If you see a jitter, go to the blue prerendered video bar above the timeline, right click above where the jitter is and Delete.
This will probably delete prerender from quite a large area, but I generally just select the area for each clip and prerender that as one block (Shift M to prerender, make sure "Render Loop Region Only" is ticked).
I found that once I had a prerender jitter free, it stayed that way. If I render out, then I do it to PAL DV so it does not need to re-render the video, then rerender to divx for net distribution using virtualdub or something.
I am thinking of trying to do it with MJPEG or something as I guess DV probably isn't a great transport codec, but for now it will do - it has let me get to a test render of my new video.
Just thought I would post something up as I know the general consensus seems to be "Editing with DivX is a real pain" but I see no reason why it *cannot* be done - Yes I understand that MPEG4 is a different beast to DV, but if you can decompress and watch it, then it is technically feasible to edit with it.
It will happen one day I am sure - comsumer camcorders will most likely go to solid state in the near future as they are much cheaper to produce and less prone to wear and tear than tape / dvd based systems. Then there is the matter of storage. With MPEG4 you can have all the video you ever shot on a hard disk - I am sure they will write edting / catalogueing software for MPEG4 camcorders so you can tag clips or part of clips like you tag an MP3. Then making family videos would be simplified - type in "Baby" and it grabs all clips of the baby and puts them in the edit bin, maybe putting them on the timeline in the chronological order they were shot. EXIF Style embedding, with eGPS enabled cameras so you can tag and retrieve clips by location, all this I am sure will come and I reckon probably within the lifetime of MPEG4.
Last edited by evilc; 05-31-2008 at 12:54 AM.
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