You might consider converting to "higher quality" formats (e.g. dv)
 *before* editing. sure it will be compressed again when rendered,
but at least you can minimize the loss by avoiding the I-and-B-frame problem.

good luck
georg



On Thursday, 5. July 2007 16:57:38 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> On Thu, 5 Jul 2007, Pier Luigi Conte wrote:
> > Does it exist a method to don't compress again (during the render phase)
> > an originally already compressed video?
>
> Allowing Cinelerra to pass-through frames where possible is a wishlist
> feature.  At the moment, it doesn't exist.  You can get that effect with a
> lot more effort using some other tools instead of Cinelerra, but even in
> the case where you're just cutting (without doing fancier effects), some
> recompression is unavoidable because of the way MPEG compression works.
>
> The thing is, the MPEG stream contains a few frames called I-frames that
> are complete in themselves, but most of the frames are B-frames, which
> are stored by storing the differences between the current frame and nearby
> I-frames.  If your cut eliminates an I-frame, then you MUST recompress the
> B-frames that depend on it.  (Things called P-frames also exist but
> considering them wouldn't really clarify the discussion.)
>
> For example, suppose you have two video streams that look like this:
>
> Stream 1: I0 B1 B2 B3 I1 B4 B5 B6 I2...
> Stream 2: I3 B7 B8 B9 I4 B10 B11 B12 I5...
>
> You want to cut from Stream 1 after frame B5, to Stream 2 before frame B8,
> so as to get this sequence of frames:
>
> I0 B1 B2 B3 I1 b4 b5 b8 b9 I4 B10 B11 B12 I5...
>
> The problem is that frames B4 and B5 depend on frame I2, which isn't
> included in your output, and frames B8 and B9 depend on frame I3, which
> isn't included in your output.  (I showed them with lowercase letters to
> make it clearer).  So you have to recompress those frames at least.
> You've also got an unusually long interval between frames I1 and I4 (I4 is
> the fifth frame after I1 whereas the original streams had an interval of
> four), and although that doesn't break any rules in this particular case,
> there *are* constraints on how long the interval is allowed to be, and
> it's easy to imagine cases where cutting could violate those constraints
> and you've have to recompress some I-frames too.
>
> There are also long-term bit rate contraints in things like DVDs, which
> you're allowed to violate for a short time but not for a long time, and in
> the worst case, cutting together two pieces that are near the limit could
> push you over and force you to recompress a substantial chunk of video.
> So avoiding recompression where possible is not just a matter of "skip
> over the recompression code" - making such an effort actually work, is a
> hard problem.



-- 
dr.k.g.hooss
schoepfung & wandel wissenschaftliche medienberatung
breite strasse 6-8, d-23617 luebeck
www.schoepfung-und-wandel.de

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