The Great Tree

[Durin Mephit]

I use Adobe Premiere Pro 2 to assemble the Great Tree Prologue videos. I thought I should share some information about that here, for anyone else who might find my experiences interesting or helpful.

FRAPS, which I use to capture video, saves video in a proprietary format. This format only includes a decoder for purposes outside of FRAPS; it is not possible to encode to FRAPS format through any method other than recording through FRAPS. All of the video is encoded to 800x600, higher-res than the final released episodes (at 640x480).

I've had some problems when assembling and rendering episodes from Premiere using the FRAPS codec. Adobe Premiere may generate one of three errors: An error dialog with no text in it (very rare), an out of memory encoding with FRAPS error (occasionally), or an "Error: Unknown Error" message (far too frequently). My best guess is that the FRAPS decoder has some inherent problems when used in conjunction with Adobe Premiere. The problem is worse for longer episodes, especially with many scene or video clip transitions. I've watched Premiere's memory use while rendering episodes and it slowly climbs as it writes out the video, only reducing back to a normal value after the write is complete or has failed. I suspect a memory leak - memory isn't being freed for re-use when it should be.

I've tried re-encoding substantial portions of video into alternative lossless codecs. I'd used the Lagarith lossless codec for a while and it seemed spiffy, but it is still being developed, and I found that "stable" versions weren't necessarily stable. So, I started using HuffyUV, which is an old and stable lossless codec that isn't changing. But the compression is not that great, and when I reached Episode 6, I started experiencing an increased number of "Unknown error" failures. I worked around the problem by writing out Episode 6 in two parts for each language, then concatenating the videos with Virtualdub. This is not an optimal solution.

I had to resurrect Episodes 0 and 1 again to address some legal issues, which I'll talk about elsewhere when I'm done and have updated the downloadable copies. Anyway, I ran into the same problem with Episode 1; even though it's a short episode, that particular episode has been revised many times and is now a very complex project from all of the changes and lessons learned along the way of making these videos. And every time I tried to write out a complete copy of the episode, it would fail near the end of the process.

I decided it was time to look for another lossless codec.

Searching Google for "lossless video", the top link was to the MSU Lossless codec, which has remained at a frightening development version number of 0.6.0 since 1995. But looking over the comparison of MSU to other codecs, I noticed one I hadn't paid much attention to before: "CamCodec 1.0." That looked promising. So, I looked into it.

CamCodec is an open source format that's part of CamStudio ( http://camstudio.org/ ), an open source program that can be used to record more than just DirectX - it can record all screen and audio on a computer, and can write out AVIs or SWFs. It's a great solution if you want to create a training video for how to do something on your computer.

The codec has two options - an "LUV" format for "fast" encoding... and gzip. The gzip format immediately caught my attention. It's a very standard compression format, thoroughly vetted. Not fast... but for what I need, I don't really need fast. So, I converted all of the video for Episode 1 to CamCodec using gzip at highest compression, using VirtualDub. Then came the big test...

Writing out a video from Premiere using CamCodec-gzip video is very slow, much slower than using the video compressed with FRAPS or HuffyUV. However, it has proven to be reliable. Premiere's memory usage still climbs obnoxioiusly, so some of the memory leak problem may be endemic to Premiere and not the fault of the codecs (no surprise). And, I haven't yet experimented to see if decompressing video using gzip at lower compression rates is any faster. But, so far so good with Episode 1, where it was previously giving me fits.

I'll have to try converting all of the Episode 6 video to this format and run a test render to know for certain if CamCodec is the cure I've been looking for, but for now, I'm happy if for no other reason than it provides a format that is lossless but extremely tight so it'll be easier for me to back up these video assets to DVD.
_________________
Durin Mephit * Member of Guild of Messengers - Unless otherwise stated, opinions are mine only and not Guild endorsed.
rel.to | Marten KI: 59474 | Durin M KI: 11883768

[Durin Mephit]

I have news regarding Cam(Studio)Codec and Premiere for anyone who cares.

Experiments were a success. Although the rendering time for movies using CamCodec-format inputs is much, much longer, Premiere uses significantly less memory during the process, and does not crash.

After converting all of the .avi files to the CamCodec format, I now have 200 GB of free disk space (on a 300GB drive; the Great Tree Episodes folder is now a svelte 23 GB). That, too, is a very good thing. I'll probably convert my Season 1 video archives to this format as well, and see how much more disk space I can recover.
_________________
Durin Mephit * Member of Guild of Messengers - Unless otherwise stated, opinions are mine only and not Guild endorsed.
rel.to | Marten KI: 59474 | Durin M KI: 11883768

[Erik]

Good to hear. I hope it will save you a lot of frustrations during the production of the next episodes.

[janaba1]

[Durin Mephit]

People rarely comment on the announcements for The Cavern Today's podcasts or for CCN's CavernCasts.

Beyond a certain point, people take things for granted. We'll have to see what people post after we've completed the series. Will they realize we've reached the last one?
_________________
Durin Mephit * Member of Guild of Messengers - Unless otherwise stated, opinions are mine only and not Guild endorsed.
rel.to | Marten KI: 59474 | Durin M KI: 11883768

[Erik]

Yeah, I noticed that too. Funny Youtube movies get a lot of feedback, but our documentaries almost aren't getting any feedback at all. Perhaps the quality of the documentaries is so high, that people tend to forget that it's just being done by volunteers? But that's just speculation.

Everyone seems to know them though, which is a good point. I noticed that when greydragon was in the Cavern and mentioned our docus, various people immediately said how much they liked the docus as well.
I do get quite a few comments from the usual Dutch watchers through MSN and PMs in URU with every episode.

I think people really appreciate what we (and especially Marten) are doing, but they just don't get how much a simple message can mean.

[janaba1]

I don't know, if you already found a more comfortable solution for
en/de/transcoding, Marten, but in case you didn't I can provide
links to two very interesting applications, I stumbled upon today,
that really seem to be worth a look or maybe two...

http://www.erightsoft.net/SUPER.html

http://mediacoder.sourceforge.net/

Both freeware of course...

I've downloaded them myself and will have a look into them
after breakfast, but for my own purposes and just of general
interest... I dunno, what you need exactly...

[Durin Mephit]

Cool links, Jana!

For the record, I use Virtualdub for transcoding.
_________________
Durin Mephit * Member of Guild of Messengers - Unless otherwise stated, opinions are mine only and not Guild endorsed.
rel.to | Marten KI: 59474 | Durin M KI: 11883768

[Szark]