Digital Video - November 2008 - (Page 38)

CLICK TO PLAY BY NELS JOHNSON CROSS-PLATFORM ALCHEMY HANDY TOOLS COMBINE TO EASE CONVERSION DUTIES. E very couple of years, I rip a crate of DVDs into licensed, DRM’d WMVs for a client who sells a vertical-market video jukebox for dedicated Windows machines with TV set monitors. Till now, this was labor-intensive (video capture card, Windows Media Encoder, etc.) and required frequent testing/resetting of audio levels, manual chapter selection and TRT coordination based on the DVD packaging. All doable, but way too much like 1998 — which is why the job usually began with a Google seek for free or cheap softwareonly salvation. This year I got lucky and found HandBrake (http://handbrake.fr) on the first Google results page. You put in a DVD, out comes a single movie file. Not unknown to most professional media wranglers but new to me as a reliable business tool, which made me learn and appreciate it. Unfortunately, the app exports only MP4, AVI, MKV and OGM files on the Mac and PC. Worse, MS Expression Encoder can’t load MP4 files. For this gig I needed WMV output (and MS DRM — the horror, the horror). Batch conversion from MP4 to WMV was also on the wish list. Enter Flip4Mac, Telestream’s formidable solution for rendering WMVs on Mac OS. The $50 Studio version lets you export to WMV from, say, MP4 via QuickTime Pro with much more reliability than even the free VLC Player. Yes, you are going from MPEG-2 through MP4 to WMV, but the results I experienced were more than good enough for full-screen commercial playback when re-sampling with a high enough data rate (at least 1MB). The full workflow, including batch processing, is detailed below. Figure 1. HandBrake’s main user interface (Mac OS version). HANDBRAKE According to the site intro, “HandBrake is an open-source, GPLlicensed, multiplatform, multithreaded DVD to MPEG-4 converter, available for Mac OS X, Linux and Windows.” Supported input sources include “VIDEO_TS folder, DVD image or RealDVD (encrypted or unencrypted, but protection methods other than CSS are not supported and must be handled externally with third-party software), and some VOB and TS files.” (The main UI is shown in Figure 1.) Insert your source DVD, drop down the Title list and choose the one with the longest TRT, which should be obvious. The associated chapter drop-downs will auto-populate with default selections. If you have favorite settings for frame rate, bit rate, video frame size, codec, quality, etc., select them from the relevant controls. For this job I wanted quarter-screen video output and a 1MB data rate because all files would be played back pixel-doubled on TV sets (attached to Windows machines). Other target monitors will require different encoding recipes. The rips went faster on the Mac than on the (similarly-equipped, dual core 2GHz) PC. The Mac was an Intel Mini. Fortunately I was converting from MPEG-2 to MP4. Targeting H.264 over the course of 50 DVDs would have added much more time to the production schedule without additional processing power. Even with one Mac and one PC working around the clock, this part of the job took several days to complete (including occasional start-overs and cropping experiments). FLIP4MAC Once the feature-length MP4s were assembled and spot-tested on a single external hard drive, it was time for transcoding to WMV, but only on the Mac. Telestream has a high-end batch converter named Episode (http://www.flip4mac.com/episode.htm) with lots of other useful features for $500, but that would have dinged the profit margin. My two best choices for free DIY batching were 1) use an AppleScript or 2) make the Mac perform multiple transcodes simultaneously and hope it didn’t crash during the extended process (up to 24 hours doing 8 to 10 at a time). The only real difference here is www.dv.com 38 dv november 2008 http://handbrake.fr http://www.flip4mac.com/episode.htm http://www.dv.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Digital Video - November 2008

Digital Video - November 2008 Contents AG-HMC150 Camcorder I-Cuff Eyepiece Protector Instant Expert Avid Media Composer 3.0 DT-B9L 1DU Monitor Flolight LCD500 Dark Red Close-Up: Chop Shop Socky Prime Mover Tools & Technology: DV Expo Toolkit Click to Play DV101 Production Diary

Digital Video - November 2008

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