Hi guys, thanks for the help and sorry for the delay in answering, caused
mainly by the lack of internet here last week... Scott, as you should know,
your site seems to be the main resourse for hdv under linux, I had been
reading some stuff previously to your mail without actually relating person
to site until you sent the link. Cheers!
So, OpenGL issue, ok. I may upgrade my machine soon or eventually but until
that happens I guess I'll stick with cinelerra as it is. Or until I actually
start the editing, as Marcin pointed out. Dan, I'll try again to compile
dvgrab 3.0, but I'm a newba at compiling, I'll search for basic instructions
(./configure, make, make install always give me unpronounceable mistakes =(
).
Two issues remain then, (1) the xml at render and (2) the act of rendering
itself.
(1) the XML
About the proxy editing described in the manual, as far as I understood it,
it consists in down-converting the clips from hdv to a dv resolution (such
as 1440x1080i -> 720x480i), so that editing would be done in dv and,
finally, at the time of rendering, making the XML that has been generated by
cinelerra point to the original HDV clips and to a HDV project. The python
script whose link is at the manual would then do this last part, of changing
the XML and creating a backup of the original XML file.
I haven't been able to use the script, either because I am doing it wrong
(instructions at the manual are very "dry", very direct) or because it isn't
really working. I'm copying below the command I've used (in bold, first
line) and the result it generated to see if anyone can help me:
-> where "cinelerra.xml" is the XML of the project I was testing, a
1440x1080i editing timeline:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]:~/Desktop/testes hdv$ ./proxychange.py cinelerra.xml
-from `proxyfiles/(\w+)\.avi` -to `hdv/\1.toc`
bash: command substitution: line 1: syntax error near unexpected token `\w+'
bash: command substitution: line 1: `proxyfiles/(\w+)\.avi'
bash: hdv/1.toc: Arquivo ou diretório não encontrado
Minidom wird gehackt....
Minidom.Element=__main__.MyElement
['./proxychange.py', 'cinelerra.xml', '-from', '-to']
read session cinelerra.xml
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "./proxychange.py", line 248, in ?
parseAndDo()
File "./proxychange.py", line 76, in parseAndDo
dom = readSession(filename=args[0])
File "./proxychange.py", line 96, in readSession
dom = xml.dom.minidom.parse(srcfile)
File "xml/dom/minidom.py", line 1915, in parse
File "xml/dom/expatbuilder.py", line 928, in parse
File "xml/dom/expatbuilder.py", line 207, in parseFile
xml.parsers.expat.ExpatError: not well-formed (invalid token): line
17, column 99
I'm not sure if I had to change anything in the command line apart from the
name of the XML file, so I didn't, I simply copied the rest from the manual.
This part is not working but I could eventually edit the XML manually. I
tried using the program meld to see the differences between a HDV and a DV
project files to see where I would have to change them in case I had to.
(2) rendering the HDV
>From what I've read, I would have to render the video using YUV4MPEG in
cinelerra. I even tried rendering the video as a MPEG video, using the
option there (to be mplexed later), but somehow it failed to write anything
as output - it must be said that I had a 1second clip of a TOC I had
manually generated after capturing the .ts file. So I was working already
with a 1440x1080i video under a 1440x1080i project. So I sticked with the
attempts of YUV4MPEG.
After reading carefully mpeg2enc's manual and trying many different options,
I haven't been able to render about anything using mpeg2enc. The response
was always the warning I copy below (usually repeated for four or five
times) followed by an "error rendering data" or something similar warning.
The first warning was:
int YUVStream::write_frame(uint8_t**):write_frame() failed: system
error (failed read/write)
I had checked the list for previous posts on YUV4MPEG and usually people
said to change something on preferences->format. I tried changing it even to
a preset of 1920x1080 (there isn's one of 1440x1080, it sets to "user
defined") with no success. I eventually tried rendering to the mpeg2enc's
DVD preset at the YUV4MPEG options, also with the same error, also resulting
in a 0kb file being created. Finally, I had 30GB of space where I was
placing these test files, so space wouldn't have been the problem.
To some extent, I have obtained a certain degree of success in rendering
using YUV4MPEG with FFMPEG. I have changed and re-changed the FFMPEG's
options and it usually does render a file. Only three problems then remain,
one of which seems very disturbing, one disturbing and one I could live
with:
- the first problem, the one I could live with, is that the m2v file
rendered is read as 25fps by FFMPEG in case I am to reconvert it to any
other format afterwards. The error reads as:
"seems stream 0 codec frame rate differs from container frame rate:
29.97(30000/1001) ->
25.00 (25/1)"
FFMPEG then reads the source as a 25fps file rather than a 29.97, even
though my cinelerra project was 29.97, my FFMPEG render option was explicit
29.97 (using -r 29.97) and even though MPlayer and gnome do read this file
as being 29.97. I could live with this part because I could force an encoder
to read the source file as being 29.97 in order to reencode it, but somehow
this seems very odd.
The only way I could actually make FFMPEG to render a 29.97 m2v file (that
could be re-read by it as a 29.97fps file) was using the -target ntsc-dvd
preset, which then left me with a maximum of 9000kbps of output file
(ffmpeg's maximum to dvd's mpeg files). =(
- the second problem, the disturbing one, is that not rendering via mpeg2enc
I can't tell FFMPEG to render a file ready for mplexing the audio
afterwards, something that mpeg2enc would. So I fear that, even if I
succesfully render the m2v, it will fail when I try to mplex the audio in
it. But, at this point, it is just foreseeing, this fear does not relate to
a real experience, just from previous ones - that meaning, I might be wrong.
- and the last problem, the very odd one and very disturbing, is that no
matter what I inform FFMPEG to do, it renders a file with a maximum
104857kbps. I don't know where this number comes from, but it must mean
something, because it is such a weird number it has to be the limit of
something. This doesn't happen if i simply run FFMPEG from a terminal, I've
taken the opportunity to test it, it does reach the 25000kbps of the HDV
compression, so it can be a limitation inside cinelerra.
So the last question after this long mail is: is there a way I can save the
file (the xml), close the program and render it (the xml) from a terminal?
Because maybe this way I could workaround the rendering issues, maybe? If
so, how could I do this? I saw that section 20.6 of the manual describes
this procedure, but that way it seems I would fall on the same results, but
I'll also check it, just in case!
sorry for the long mail, thanks again for the help,
flavio
