Sorenson Squeeze problem

[Rich Rubasch]

These big reference files are convenient to a point…if it’s short and has few layers. Lots of things can clog the reading of a ref clip during compression. There is a ton of seeking around to put the pieces of the ref clip back together for the encoder. Usually, on a length more than 20 minutes or so you are better off ouptting the program to tape and redigitizing from the master to a single file. A reference clip from that new digitized clip will make it thgought the encoder much easier.

A real pain in the keester when your show is amost 2 hours…that’s 2 hours to tape and 2 hours back in, but you will not have those problems with the encoder.

Another option is to save out of AVID to a compressed codec of some sort to a self contained clip (still quite large) and run that clip through the encoder.

If you will be making these DVDs from long program material on a regular basis, the I recommend one of the PCI card realtime encoders from Wired or other…some of the cheaper PC video cards support realtime MPEG2 encoding from your master tape. I would find one of those…chances are you will make a tape master anyway, so after you make it just send it through the encoder realtime and 2 hours later you have your MPEG2.

But big ref clips from a long, multi-layered program are a bear.

One last thought…have you done a mixdown of the video tracks? In the AVID I used to do a mixdown to two new tracks and then delete all the other audio, this made for a neater ref clip.

Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media

[Richard Ladius]

I’ve already put the show to master and brought it over to a new system. I recorded into avid from a DSR-45, and then exported as quicktime reference.

I got the video to compress fine by turning off the audio output. Now when I compress my audio file (it was exported from avid as .aif), I get the same error. I don’t know why a simple audio file (only two tracks) could create this kind of problem. Should I try exporting the audio as some other filetype? Would lowering the bitrate work?

Thanks for the help!

[Rich Rubasch]

That is strange…you get the same error with the audio file? What is the audio’s sample rate and what are you encoding it to?

Rich

[Craig Seeman]

Although I’m a Mac person I’ve heard of similar issues on Avid/Mac side and Squeeze. Have you tried saving as a self contained movie (not reference)?

Is it possible you can save in a non Avid proprietary codec? On the Mac side, saving to Apple’s DV mov rather than Avid’s, has solved issues similar to this.

[Richard Ladius]

alright, I have it working now. I am encoding as PCM Audio at 1536 kb/s (same as before). All I did however was re-export from avid without selecting video tracks. I’m not sure what this did differently since the audio was already a seperate file, but Sorenson is compressing it perfectly now. I have the DVD made, and all is well. Thanks again for the help guys! Long live the Cow!

[Craig Seeman]

Maybe post a step by step for what you did that worked. I think others have bumped into similar issues with Avid export for compression so a step by step might be a great help.

BTW, If you encode audio AC3 (192kbps for example) instead of PCM you’ll get a good but much smaller audio file, which can give you more room to push up the data rate for the video MPEG2 file.