Digital
Dilemmas
By David Shamah,
The
Picture a valley. You’re on
one side, and you want – need – to get to the other side.
But the only way to get from
point A to point B is to jump. The gap between the two peaks seems manageable,
but as you look down in the valley, you see people thrashing about, holding for
dear life onto what look like radios, cameras, and VCRs – all analog, of
course.
As the prospective leapers
line up on your side of the valley, getting ready to jump, you spy over onto
the other side – and it looks like they’re having some sort of party! There are
balloons, free pizza, and occasional cries of joy coming from small groups of
people thronging in front of video screens, looking at the little stock numbers
race by. Once in awhile, one of them shouts out something that sounds like
“IPO!”
Your head is spinning;
you’re not ready for this brave new world! It’s not worth it, you say; why not
just stay here, in the safe, analog world?
So you start to turn back.
But as you move away from the edge of the valley, you realize that everyone is
going in the opposite direction – some being dragged, kicking and screaming.
You can’t go back; there’s a monster there, they tell you, the monster of
Obsolescence, which will render you nothing more than an irrelevant blip.
Sounds like the opening of a
scary book, right? Well, if you think the book on moving from the analog to the
digital world is scary, wait until you see the movie! Or rather, wait until you
hear about the movie I tried to make with my cool digital equipment and my
computer!
I wanted to review a very
nice little program I dug up called VCDEasy
(http://www.vcdeasy.org/), which lets you take any digital media file – audio,
clips, pictures or video – and prepare a Video CD (VCD) – a format that can be
played on most DVD players. It’s a nice, easy to use program, but the really
nice part of it is that it lets you record your VCD on
a regular CD writer! While relatively few people have DVD recorders on their
computers, most newer computers come with CD writers, and quite few people use
them to record audio CDs and MP3s for computers or even automobile MP3 players
(just got one last week!). With VCDEasy, you can
easily take pictures or video and painlessly record it onto a disc that can be
read by the DVD player attached to your TV.
Out of all the requests I
get to cover a topic, burning CDs and DVDs – especially video CDs and DVDs – is
probably at the top of the list. If you’ve ever done it or thought about it,
you know why people are desperately seeking advice, even from the likes of me:
The digital video world is a jungle of formats, encoding schemes, and CD/DVD
burner formats and settings, in addition to the usual questions of video format
– NTSC and PAL, to name just two – and it’s only the truly adventurous that try
their luck at burning one.
So I’ve put off writing
about this topic until I could describe a method that would pretty much work
for everyone, without requiring a graduate degree in digital video technology –
or requiring users to spend hours poring over poorly written manuals that use
Mandarin Chinese sentence structures to describe highly technical subjects. But
VCDEasy looks like the real goods. The program works flawlessly, and there is an extensive help file in which the
author discusses the finer points of formats and settings available.
I purposely ignored the
directions on my first tries with VCDEasy, just to
see if the hype measured up to the reality, and I was able to put together a
number of VCDs, which played just fine on a DVD using
the out-of-the-box settings provided by the author. VCDEasy
really is an easy to use program, and if you feed it your digital files, it
will do its thing and spit out a VCD, suitable for framing – or playing.
So, don’t take anything in
this rest of this article as criticism of VCDEasy.
The program significantly cut the time I had to spend on burning video CDs,
compared to other programs and methods I have used. It’s easy and automatic
enough for even a novice to use. Any problems in the process are outside the
jurisdiction of VCDEasy.
Warning: Geek talk coming (only one
paragraph, though). The key to a successful VCD production is ensuring your
file is in the right format – and has the right Codec (more on these below). In
order to make a VCD, your video must be in MPEG-1 or 2 format.
MPEG is a compression method, optimized for video compression, that allows
really big digital media files to get scrunched down onto the limited disk
space of a CD or DVD – or to be downloaded from a Website, like an MP3 (MPEG-1
audio layer 3) which is a type of MPEG compression.
So, the bottom line is that
in order for VCDEasy to work its magic, you have to
make sure your files are in MPEG-1 or 2 format. The
program does not convert from other formats (like AVI) for you – you have to do
it manually.
So said
the instructions. But I was
pleasantly surprised to find that the program does indeed convert between
digital stills (JPEGs, TIFFs, bitmaps, Photoshop
format images, etc) and MPEG-1. In fact, my first VCDEasy
project was a VCD of still images I had taken with my digital video camera.
Making the digital stills VCD was easy as could be. I simply selected the
pictures, which were in JPEG format and VCDEasy did
the rest – including converting and encoding them into MPEG-1 format. In went
the files, and out popped the VCD from my regular CD burner.
This was great! I was really
rolling here! I popped the VCD into a DVD player, and got a nice slide show
type program that utilized all the features of the DVD player software. I made a
second stills VCD, this time playing around with some of the settings, like
changing the delay between shots.
Now it was time to get
ambitious – and try to produce a VCD with moving images on it. As it happens,
my digital video camera (Canon PowerShot A60 – see
review and info at www.megapixel.net/reviews/canon-a60/a60-review.html)
is able to record video, too. So I took one of my short video files and
uploaded it into VCDEasy.
This time, things weren’t so
easy. VCDEasy doesn’t do video conversions, so I had
to get my files into the proper MPEG-1 format in order to get my VCD going, and
it seems that my digital camera recorded its files in AVI format. AVI (Audio/Video
Interleaved) is usually associated with Windows, and indeed it is the preferred
format for Windows Media Player and other Microsoft products.
No problem; I opened up my
copy of TMPGEnc (http://www.tmpgenc.net/),
which specializes in convert video files from one compression method to
another. I have successfully used TMPGEnc in the past
to convert files from AVI to MPEG for playback by Quicktime on Macintosh
computers, so I know the program and method work just fine.
Not this time, though; I got
the dreaded “file format cannot be processed” message that is the bane of
anyone working with digital files, and pops up all too often, in my opinion.
Oh, why can’t they all just get their act together and use a single easy to
implement format?
But whining wasn’t going to
solve this. I had a dilemma here; the file identified itself as an AVI, but the
tools that usually work with AVI weren’t working. What could the problem be?
Obviously, it was (pregnant
pause for dramatic effect) – the Codec. A Codec is an encoder/decoder that lets
files be played on different equipment or using different methods (like digital
phone signals on analog telephones). Codecs are the
bane of digital video hobbyists, because they are like the little surprise in
the box of Crackerjacks; you never know what you’re going to get, and figuring
out how to put it together is always a hassle, and it never works right even
when you build it. Without getting too technical, suffice to say that without
the right Codec, you can’t play or convert a file on your computer, even if it
is ostensibly in the same format (like AVI).
After many minutes (many,
many minutes) of trying to track down the problem, I got the bright idea to try
and play the file using Quicktime Player (www.apple.com/quicktime/download/),
which very conveniently lists specific formats. Quicktime informed me that my
AVI format was something called Motion JPEG, which eventually led me to http://www.morgan-multimedia.com/,
where I was able to download a Motion JPEG Codec. After which I was able to use
TMPGEnc to convert my uploaded digital camera video
to MPEG-1 format, which allowed me to convert it in VCDEasy
– and produce a VCD which worked just fine in my DVD player.
Friend, I bring you this
tale of woe not to seek your sympathy, but to describe a method for the
adventurous among you to do as I did. Download VCDEasy,
TMPGEnc, and Quicktime Player, upload a video from
your digital camera or digital camcorder, and start producing your own videos.
The same questions/problems crop up when converting between other formats and
MPEG-1 (I would stay away from SVCD/MPEG-2 for now) – but, using these tools, jumping
over the digital valley is a little bit less daunting than it once was.
VCDEasy and TMPENgc for Windows 98
systems and better; both are shareware, with free trial period and limitations
on file sizes in the free version.
Questions/comments to ds@newzgeek.com