Wide World of Women

I was wondering how you make a slow motion clip in a vid. For example, I'll usually see a vid with a clip at regular speed, then a slow motion replay of the clip after it. Is it just a feature in certain editing software? Or can you capture the clip being played slow somehow and add it add it to the regular speed clip? I have VideoRedoPlus editing software.

Another question...Can you resize vids in VideoRedoPlus? For example, taking a 1920x1080 HD clip, and resizing it to 1280x720.

Thanks in advance for any help!

I use Womble Video Wizard to do the slo-mo. It's a lossless editor like VideoRedoPlus, but has a lot of cool effects you can add. Do note that when you add effects like slo-mo it does re-encode those parts.

Anytime you resize you're going to have to re-encode which means quality loss. You can do it with Womble and Nero Vision (part of Nero's bundle) as well as other video editing software. VideoRedoPlus doesn't have that feature.

You can always resize using an avi codec like DivX or Xvid. There are free encoders like Virtual Dub Mod you can use as long as you have the codecs installed.

Thanks for all the info donkeed! I downloaded Virtual Dub Mod and played around with it a bit. All sorts of settings and such to play around with and learn.

I know I've seen good things about Womble. Since I record in Media Center, my concern was if it would handle .dvrms files (like VRPlus does), or if I'd have to make an mpg of them first.

You have to first convert to mpeg with Redo because womble don't do DVR-MS

Gotcha, that's kinda what I thought.

I may put that off for a little while, as I should curb my spending for right now. Thanks again for the info

If I'm not mistaken DVRMS are a form of mpeg-2. You should be able to do the lossless re-mux with VideoRedoPlus to .mpg. It should only take seconds since there is no re-encoding.

For avi's, here's a good start up guide for using Virtual Dub using DivX from the DivX website. You have to buy DivX pro to use the resize and other features, but you can get an idea and test some things out with the free version. Xvid is a free codec that has excellent results you can use similarly to DivX.

http://download.divx.com/guides/QuickStart-EN.pdf

**Edit, just be aware that the guide shows you how to use the original virtual dub. There are slight differences with Virtual Dub Mod which works with mpeg-2. There's a thread already started about using V-Dub Mod so you can refer to that as well.**

Yeah my understanding is DVRMS files are an mpeg-2 file, with metadata regarding the content, digital rights management, etc. I have used VRPlus to do the lossless remux like you said, and yeah, it only takes 5 or 10 seconds to do even with a 1GB file.

I'll definitely check out that guide! It just seems like there so many options and parameters, codec setups, etc...it was a little overwhelming just to go in and mess around with it. I guess the trick is to find a good balance of video quality and filesize. Amazing how a 10 sec clip can be 30 MB or more

Thanks for the link!

The main factors in the final filesize are the audio and video bitrate.

Make sure you do full processing on audio otherwise the PCM audio will make the files huge. I use Lame mp3 set at 128Kbps stereo.

Also, I set the bitrate for the video to 1500Kbps (1.5Mbsp) to 2.5Mbps for standard definition, and 3 to 5Mbps for HD.

An easy way to do a rough calculation for the end filesize is to divide the bitrate by 8 to get the Byterate. Then multiply that by how many seconds the clip is total.

Like this:

A 3 minute clip at 2Mbps will be about 45MB because

2Mbs divided by 8 = .25MB/s

then .25MB/s * 3minutes *60sec/min = 45MB

Nice! That's a great, convenient equation

Thanks for the bitrate info...In my messing around, it seemed like 4Mbps kept the quality while reducing the filesize dramtically. (I think the original bit rate was 17Mbps)
I didn't even think about the audio that much...I actually have Lame mp3 which I use in Audacity to convert wav to mp3 of music projects I record here at home.