Windows Movie Maker Question

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Windows Movie Maker Question

Postby FoolThemAll » Mon Aug 12, 2002 11:09 pm

Movie Maker is working very slowly all of a sudden. I can barely view any of my clips because the program continually freezes for several seconds whenever I attempt to play something. The result is that I get something like a really slow slide show instead of a movie clip.

I'd assume that I just didn't have enough memory, except that it worked fine a month ago. I haven't changed any computer hardware in the past month.

Any ideas?
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Postby jbone » Mon Aug 12, 2002 11:35 pm

Are you using DivX source? If so, that's why. DivX takes a gargantuan amount of resources to decode, and no matter how powerful your computer is or how much RAM you have, you probably don't have enough power to decode lots and lots of independent DivX streams simultaneously.
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Postby FoolThemAll » Tue Aug 13, 2002 1:16 am

Yes. But the thing is, I was using DIVX a month before and there was no terrible slowdown like there is now.

Thanks for helping me figure out the "why", though.
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Postby klinky » Tue Aug 13, 2002 3:15 am

My guess is that you have poorly keyframed crap and when it's hacking your footage up into clips it's taking ten years to seek through the file since it's in divx = crap for editing with.


Try taking your source and running it through VirtualDub into something like Indeo, Cinepack, Huffyuv(big tho), MJPEG(big also, $$$ too), then try it see what happens.




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Postby trythil » Tue Aug 13, 2002 3:25 pm

Indeo and Cinepak are kinda crappy -- I wouldn't bother editing with those.

HuffYUV is nice, but, as nearly everybody has said before, it does take up quite a bit of space.

MJPEG doesn't necessarily cost a lot of money -- it used to take a significant amount of horsepower to decode MJPEG on the fly, but computers are getting to the point where it can all be done very quickly in software (my Quicktime MJPEG sources decode smoothly on my Athlon Thunderbird/850), and free MJPEG implementations aren't unheard of.

Though if you're REALLY picky about quality, MJPEG may not be your thing, either. A page that nicely describes the tradeoffs in using MJPEG (and DV) for editing sources can be found here.
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Postby klinky » Tue Aug 13, 2002 4:01 pm

I've yet to find a free win32 mjpeg codec :cry:

PicVideo has a speedy one, but it cost moo-la like $35...

I only suggested indeo/cinepack because they're free and everyone has them installed(if you have a win32 box).

If you can do huffYUV you can do MJPEG....

Just both are big....and really unless you max out the quality on MJPEG it'll look like crap.


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Postby Mask of Destiny » Tue Aug 13, 2002 5:46 pm

There is a free web version of one of the CUSeeMe packages that comes with a Free MJPEG codec. I don't remember the name at the moment, but I can look it up on my desktop at home.
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Postby mexicanjunior » Tue Aug 13, 2002 7:50 pm

Ditto about the Divx problem. WMM hates most Divx encodes and usually crashes after a few cuts. MJPEG is not bad if you raise the quality to 90% or higher. It's still like 1/3 the filesize of huffy.
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Postby FoolThemAll » Tue Aug 13, 2002 8:26 pm

Thanks, everyone. I'll try using indeo.
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Postby FoolThemAll » Thu Aug 15, 2002 12:12 am

Stupid question: how do I use indeo?
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Postby RadicalEd0 » Thu Aug 15, 2002 3:02 am

you dont. Indeo sucks like you wouldnt believe. Not to mention its reely old. Definitely use mjpeg if and only if huffyuv isnt possible. Or another thing that works well is XviD at quant 1, about 4x smaller than huffyuv in yuy2 mode.
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