Really realy fustrated. please help

[Darby Edelen]

[cyprusx] “the video was recorded with tap, then ripped to a dvd, then converted to avi. with some errors( skipped).”

I am confused by your workflow here. When you say ‘tap’ i’m assuming you mean ‘tape’ (if you meant anything else, please clarify as a google search of ‘tap’ didn’t provide much… but I did get to read up on the history of tap dance!)

When you say the video was ‘ripped to a dvd’ do you mean ‘burned to a dvd’? Generally you rip things off a DVD and burn them on. If you burned the footage onto a DVD, did you burn it as data or as a DVD that could be played in a set top box?

I think I’m confused about the conversion to AVI just because I’m confused about the previous steps.

Please clarify where your source footage is coming from and why you’re taking these steps to deal with it?

Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA

[Cyprusx]

i used a dvd recorder to rip footage from a tape. then i riped the dvd footage from the dvd to avi, using magic dvd ripper.

maybe i chose the wrong settings, are there divx settings that are not compatible with after effects.

[Jim Arcon]

For me, After Effects has been able to handle almost any valid video I have given it.

I would guess that the probelm lies in “…ripped to a dvd, then converted to avi. with some errors( skipped)…” Whatever errors occurring in the conversion process probably cause the file to not work in AE (Maybe not anywhere else either.)

To troubleshoot, see if the file plays by itself, or works in some other application like Premiere, if you have it. A suggestion: why not go directly from tape to your computer, and skip the problematic conversion process?

Another suggestion: if you are only editing your movie, you might also find it quicker/easier to use Premiere.

[Darby Edelen]

[cyprusx] “i used a dvd recorder to rip footage from a tape”

If you have footage on a tape you should probably try to digitize that using a deck. What kind of tape is it? If you still have access to the camera used to record the tape, and you’re desperate, then you should be able to use the camera as a deck.

[cyprusx] “are there divx settings that are not compatible with after effects.”

I don’t recommend using any variation of DivX, it uses MPEG-4 compression at best, and a load of unnecessary (for your purposes) metadata at worst. I recommend the QuickTime Photo JPEG codec for fast renders in AE and smaller file sizes than uncompressed or lossless video.

Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA