[Craig Seeman] “You can create an AVI with MPEGStreamclip but I haven’t tested the results in WME on Windows.”
I used this method recently with decent results. As I’ve mentioned in other posts, I had a problem with a hitch or stutter in shots with a lot of horizontal movement–pans and the like–but that could have been related to the playback environment as well.
I used MPEG Streamclip to make an intermediate AVI in PhotoJPEG codec, 75% quality setting. I think there’s a file size limit for AVI’s in the Windows Media Encoder (Sorry, I’m not sure on this — 2GB or 4GB??), so your clip is limited in length for this approach. The AVI was accepted with no problem in WME. I encoded to 1280×720, 29.97fps, key frames at 10s, 4Mbps total data rate.
Flip4Mac did a decent job at this data rate, too. But I liked the WME version a little better. It seems to stay cleaner on cuts, dissolves, and other wholesale exchanges of pixels. I wish I could get Flip tweaked to match the WME, but so far I haven’t. Recipes would be appreciated if you find any that work.