synch problems.

[pauldrystonewall]

i am making a 30 second trailer for my website, which may will end up as a .mov or a .mpg file.

i have created all the animation in flash, and exported it as an .avi, and it comes out at exactly 30 seconds.

i have also written a 30 second piece of music, which hits a few visual cues.

but when i put the two together, they never finish at the same time! granted i am only using cool edit pro 2 (well, i'm a musician not a filmmaker) to put them together, but surely it's not a software problem?

and part 2 of the question....once i finally get everything to synch up, what is the best encoder to use to convert to either an mpeg or .mov?

cheers.

[Vertino]

quick answers to question 2...

MPEG... use TMPGEnc - http://www.tmpgenc.net/ - its the best freeware MPEG encoder out there!

MOV - Afraid its QuickTime Pro - http://www.quicktime.com/ - unless you have some Adobe products (Premiere or AE)?!

[pauldrystonewall]

good call on the mpeg encoder....and it has sorted out my synching problem...it must have been my stupidly slow processor struggling with the frame rate!

one problem though...i was hoping to get the video to be about half that size....200ish pixels across would be about right. the main reason is that it is only a 30 second long trailer, and i reckon the 5mb it is now will be too big for most people to bother with.

is there anything that will let me do that?

and cheers for the help.

[Vertino]

You should be able to change the video resolution & bitrate in TMPGEnc... however MPEGs are still usually quite large in filesize!

Alternatively you could go the DivX route?!
Check out the following site for more info...

http://www.divx-digest.com/
http://www.virtualdub.org/

[assyrix]

I ususally stick to MPEG because it guarantees the widest possible audience. If you reduce the movie size to 352x288 for PAL you get decent filesizes.

As for the sync problem I calculate everything in frames to get the exact timing. For example, if I use a bog-standard PAL movie with 25 fps I then work out the equivalent in seconds and milliseconds (or frames) and then time the sounds accurately. Never had a sync problem since.

[pauldrystonewall]

thanks for all the help guys.

i have just stumped up the ?25 for quicktime pro (which is only $30, about ?15 from the US site!) and so i am messing about with .mov files.

as i say, it is only a 30 second animation, so i am not worried about screen size, or even resolution. the main thing for me, is that the file will be small enough to encourage people to download it.

by the way, you may be interested in this, http://www.deaddigital.com/losingcontrolvideo.mov

i do web design for a record company, and this is their latest video. i would be interested to know the opnions of some film-makers.

cheers again.