[Gary Peterson]

Dave,

I’m sorry it took me so long to respond to your post and thanks for the detailed information.

What I get from their soundboard is what they record to a cd during the sermon only, so I’m very limited on what I get. And to make it more difficult they don’t mic every instrument for the praise and worship service, only the piano. So what I have to do is mix the ambient sound from the H4N internal mics with the soundboard audio, which is the singers and the piano out of all the instruments on stage. They have drums, two guitars, and a bass guitar so that leaves me with less than ideal audio to work with. But that’s the best I can get from them so I do the best with what I get.

Your information has definitely helped me understand what’s going on better and I thank you for your time and expertise. The speaker is usually the lead singer or one of the pastors and the mic is always the same one used by the lead singer, they just pass it back and forth.

I’m not that familiar with the advanced editing you talked about, can you point me to a way to take the soundboard audio (singers and piano) and remove the piano from the track? I could duplicate the track and then create piano and voice tracks. I use Audition CS6 and Audacity so any help there would be good.

Thanks again for your help.

Gary

[Gary Peterson]

I finally got my problem fixed but I’m not quite sure what happened through the process of finding the problem and fixing the problem. I’m sure that doesn’t make sense so I’ll explain it.

Recently I’ve been creating some scripts to use for future projects out of little clips I had. So I created a script (batch file) to use ffmpeg to convert an uncompressed avi file, created using VirtualDub, into an AVI file using x264 video and MP3 audio, and that’s where my problem started. Now I thought I tried the simple way first, that would be not telling ffmpeg what the input format was but letting it determine it itself. But at this point I can’t remember if I did that or not, but of course that’s what worked not the way I was trying to do it.

So here’s the two command lines I played with, first the one that Didn’t work and second the one that Does work.

THIS DID NOT WORK

ffmpeg -f rawvideo -pix_fmt bgr24 -video_size 1280x720 -r 30000/1001 -i MTS-07-8SEC.avi -vcodec libx264 -pix_fmt yuv420p -b:v 2000k -acodec libmp3lame -ar 48000 -ab 192000 -y TEST1-MTS-07-8SEC-x264-mp3.avi


Since I was giving ffmpeg an uncompressed AVI file I thought I needed to tell it what to expect for an input. But going that route never worked so today I tried it without telling ffmpeg anything but what I wanted for an output, and of course that worked. I really thought I tried that first but I guess I didn’t because it works fine.

THIS WORKED

ffmpeg -i MTS-07-8SEC.avi -vcodec libx264 -pix_fmt yuv420p -b:v 2000k -acodec libmp3lame -ar 48000 -ab 192000 -y TEST2-MTS-07-8SEC-x264-mp3.avi


SO. Sorry for being a dummy I usually try the simple way first and then build on it if needed, but not this time I guess. Thanks for all the help I appreciate it.

[Gary Peterson]

Thanks for your help I’ll continue to work on it. It’s odd how this is such a problem because I wouldn’t have expected it. I’ve used ffmpeg a number of times and it worked pretty well.

One thing I noticed in Mediainfo is the avi file has a variable frame rate I don’t know if that’s part of my problem but all the other avi’s I make with VirtualDub are constant frame rate. So far I haven’t been able to force ffmpeg to create a constant frame rate avi.

Thanks again for your help.

[Gary Peterson]

Thanks for the info it helped, not completely but at least I have some video now, but still no audio. I knew about the proper order of options but since I don’t use ffmpeg much I forgot about it, so thanks.

Here’s my command line now.

ffmpeg -f rawvideo -pix_fmt bgr24 -video_size 1280×720 -r 29.970 -i MTS-07.avi -vcodec libx264 -pix_fmt yuv420p -b:v 2000k -acodec libmp3lame -ac 2 -ar 48000 -ab 192000 -y MTS-07-x264-mp3.avi

Now I get an AVI file that will play but the video is the wrong size and flops around and the colors are wrong.

I still use the old Media Player Classic – Home Cinema which after doing more research needed the pix_format set to yuv420p, it was using 422 which it wouldn’t display.

If it helps here’s what ffplay puts out when playing the source avi.

Input #0, avi, from ‘mts-07.avi’:
Duration: 00:00:14.48, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 664443 kb/s
Stream #0:0: Video: rawvideo, bgr24, 1280×720, 29.97 tbr, 29.
Stream #0:1: Audio: pcm_s16le ([1][0][0][0] / 0x0001), 48000
21.93 A-V: -0.008 fd= 7 aq= 0KB vq= 0KB sq= 0B f=0/0

Thanks for your help.