gwyn | Rage against the machines

I am almost finished with my Buffy and Angel all-cast vid. Except.

I can't seem to make a viewable file using the normal methods I employ to create a large-window Divx avi file. I'm up to just under 50MB right now, and it's still heavily, heavily pixelated in a lot of spots, most probably because I'm using tons of filters this time. It's weird though, that with all the filters and effects I used in After Rain, for instance, this problem didn't crop up. In desperation I went back to my old methods of making a very tiny windowed MPEG4 file, and it looks great, except that it's... oh so very wee. Compared to what I've grown used to looking at, it's annoyingly small and awful. It expands to double size okay, becoming just a bit more pixelated and blurry, but... I hate to take that step back, and it refuses to allow me to adjust the size (just the same way that Divx will absolutely not allow me to change the size from 720x480 to 640x480).

I'm at my wit's end, and really down about this, and I don't know what else to do. I've wasted hours trying to come up with something, and I don't know any Mac compresions gurus in town to help me figure something out. I've searched and looked at the Divx site to see why my 5.2 version is suddenly so unusuable (I'm not up to 10.3.9, so I can't use the new Divx version). My specs are somewhat old -- Mac OS 10.2.8, FCE 2.3, QT 6.5.2. I don't really want to upgrade the OS because I'm afraid of losing some abilities, but at this point, maybe going to 10.3.9, QT 7 and getting the new Divx is the only way... I just don't know. I am not a good troubleshooter.

So, all that said... if you were interested in this vid, what would you rather DL, given my craptastic choices right now?

[Poll #820127]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I hate when that happens. I'd put up both versions, I'd download both and see what I liked better.

I don't know if this is useful to you, as I'm not on a Mac, but this: http://www.animemusicvideos.org/guides/avtech/xvid.html is the excellent AMV.org guide to encoding vids in Xvid instead of Divx.

I've used this for my own vids, the two-pass method, and I think it gives better and clearer-looking files than Divx, and that was at 20 Mb or so, rather than 50 Mb.

The nice thing about Xvid is that people who have the most common Divx codec installed (or who have VLC player, etc) can watch it right off.

Alas, non. One is that Xvid isn't for Macs, obviously, and Divx doesn't have a lot of that stuff that he mentions in the info; the Pro version might, but I'm not on the right OS version to get that, and not super sanguine about getting it right now with so many buggy things that I've heard about. The second thing is probably something to do with my setup, but I've been unable to play Xvid files without a fair bit of trouble. I usually can spend some time tweaking my QT to play them, but I cannot get them to play in VLC, which they should. So, even if they had a Mac version I'm not sure how sold I am on Xvid!

Everything about my setup seems to suck big time. I'm getting to the point where I really don't think vidding is worth this level of frustration any more. I think at this point I may just consider making them for cons and letting them be on dvds, and just... to hell with the online distribution.

I meant to also say, I'm using the two pass method. The vid seems fine in the middle when I bump it up, but... anything around the two musical bridges is a disaster.

Argh, see, I didn't know there was no Xvid available for Macs to encode in - I couldn't find anything about that in the guide or on the Xvid binaries site, so I hoped it was platform-independent.

I wish I knew what's wrong. Very odd that only parts of the video are pixelated. I hope someone else has a good idea. :-(

If you can export an uncompressed avi, I can probably do it for you.

I have a similar setup as yours and this year I started having problems with my divx exports - in my case bands of wavy lines (like someone was running a vaccum clear next to the screen). in the end, I exported an uncompressed avi (huge but that's OK), dragged it over to the PC and then used astolat's export tutorial to create divx files of around 30mb.

Killa mentioned she's also had troubles off and on -- Oh my god, what is happening to the Earth????!!!!!

This is exactly what I had in mind.

Gah. Helps if I log in.
That was me *g*

Well, once you see the effects, maybe not! But I could try to bring it up on a disc -- I have that bag o CDs I totally forgot to give you, or if you still are willing to help with the office carpet thingie this weekend, we could connect ( I heard your demo went swimmingly).

I can come by and do the carpet thing, if you want.

The demo went okay. I was sooooo nervous. Blew the first shot, but at least I didn't drop any arrows. And the second shot was okay.

Hey chica -

I won't be home unti late tonight but I could try talking you through ffmpegx. It's what I use to make dixv files (from a full quality DV). I'm happy with the results.

Or I can do it myself if you upload the DV files somewhere ... but I'm guessing that would take a long time bc of the file size.

The ffmpegX setting I use is Xvid :)

I have never been able to get ffmpegwhatever to work on my computer. I'm sure it's user error, but the problem is, I can't figure out what the error is. It just won't work, and tells me I'm missing this or that file, but not where the fuck to get it. I have come to despise that program, but it's the only way I have any hope of demuxing files, and since it won't work, I've just avoided it in the hopes that someday, Killa will be moving up here, and then I can ~~kidnap~~ invite her over and ply her with goodies and maybe she can help me figure it out.

Installing it is a little bit easier now with the newer version. You still have to add three additional files, but two of them now come in the same zip file, and the program tells you where to get them.

And I have my default Xvid-encoding settings saved, so once you got the pesky installation issue settled, you could actually open my default profile and from there it would be pretty much one-click.

(I am still scared of FCE! But I have ~~tamed~~ taught ffmpegx one trick. I'm a one-trick pony, but I do the one thing well. Or something.)

Rage against the machines

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