Making movie clips for E-Prime?

[David McFarlane]

OK, we got something to work, so here is my report in case anybody 
else can use this.  I would be very interested if others could weigh 
in with what they have used.

First, turns out my user really wanted to extract short clips (~1 
min) from commercial movie DVDs.  In short, I managed to use AoA DVD 
Ripper (http://www.aoamedia.com/dvd_ripper.htm ) to visually select a 
segment to clip from a commercial DVD, set DVD Ripper to encode it as 
MPEG-1/VCD (*.mpg), and the resulting file played in stock E-Prime 
with no further fuss.  (That will work fine as long as the DVDs that 
the user wants do not foil us with some futher copy protection, and 
assuming that our use falls within Fair Use.)

More details for those who care...

In general, we have two strategies we might apply here -- configure 
E-Prime to work with movie files as we supply them, or make sure that 
the movie files we supply are configured to work with stock 
E-Prime.  I prefer the latter strategy, because  (1) I figure that 
the E-Prime developers have optimized E-Prime for a limited range of 
formats even if we can trick it up to accept other formats, and  (2) 
I would rather not have to reconfigure E-Prime with custom codecs 
every time we move the experiment to a new machine.

So first I used GSpot (http://www.headbands.com/gspot/ ) and 
MediaInfo (http://mediainfo.sourceforge.net/en )to see what 
format/codec E-Prime uses for its own examples.  They use .mpg files, 
encoded as MPEG Video (Version 1).  So I set that as my goal.

I tried two products for ripping the DVD samples.  First I tried 
HandBrake (http://handbrake.fr ), but  (1) the interface does not 
seem to have a good visual way to select arbitrary clips,  (2) it was 
*very* slow (we canceled before it finished), and  (3) HandBrake 
itself insists that it is only a transcoder, *not* a DVD ripper.

After Googling around a bit I moved on to AoA DVD Ripper.  This 
provides a good-enough visual interface for selecting arbitrary 
clips, worked pretty fast, and produced an .avi file that played in 
Media Player.  That file did not play in stock E-Prime, however, but 
once I reconfigured DVD Ripper to output MPEG-1 all was well.  (I 
also set File Split Mode to Infinite just to avoid splitting 
files.)  Note that by default DVD Ripper outputs .avi at 720x480 
resolution, or .mpg at 352x240 resolution, so you might want to 
fiddle with that further.  (It costs US$40 (cheap!) to register DVD 
Ripper, and I do not know how the paid version differs from the free 
one, but if you find the program useful then please do the right 
thing and pay for it.)

Now as it turns out, when I installed AoA DVD Ripper it also 
installed an Xvid codec, so then the .avi file played in E-Prime as 
well.  But the .mpg file continued to play in E-Prime even after I 
uninstalled the Xvid codec, so I feel safer sticking with .mpg (MPEG-1).

For the record, if we did want to fiddle with codecs for E-Prime, in 
addition to letting AoA DVD Ripper install Xvid, PST recommends the 
ffdshow (http://www.free-codecs.com/download/ffdshow.htm ) and SUPER 
(http://www.erightsoft.com/SUPER.html ) codec libraries (see 
http://support.pstnet.com/forum/Topic635-12-1.aspx and 
http://www.pstnet.com/forum/Topic2986-5-1.aspx ).

Finally, as mentioned earlier in this thread, for more extensive 
video editing VirtualDub (http://www.virtualdub.org ) might come into 
play.  This outputs only in .avi format, so would require installing 
codecs for E-Prime, or using A0A DVD Ripper or HandBrake to transcode 
the output files as needed for use in E-Prime.

I still have no idea what system to use in case we ever want to 
generate video for E-Prime from scratch, but I guess we will cross 
that bridge when we come to it.

-- David McFarlane, Professional Faultfinder


At 7/11/2011 04:19 PM Monday, David McFarlane wrote:
>Telephoning and Googling around trying to answer my own question #1...
>
>First general-purpose answer I got was Windows Movie Maker, which 
>already comes with recent versions of MS Windows.  Have any of you 
>found success with that?
>
>A more serious source recommends Final Cut Pro (or perhaps the less 
>expensive Final Cut Express).  Anyone have any experience with 
>that?  It will render in a host of codecs, so it should do a good 
>job of rendering clips for E-Prime.  But it is a Mac-only product.
>
>So I looked for Windows alternatives to FCP, and came up with Adobe 
>Premiere, or Sony Vegas.  Can anybody tell me something about these products?
>
>Thanks again,
>-- David McFarlane, Professional Faultfinder
>
>
>At 7/11/2011 03:36 PM Monday, David McFarlane wrote:
>>Well fellow E-Prime mavens, now I could use your experience & 
>>advice.  I first checked in the New Features Guide, and did a 
>>cursory search through the PST Knowledge Base, the PST Forum, and 
>>the E-Prime Google Group, and did not find this addressed anywhere, 
>>so I hope I have done my homework at least as well as I expect others to :).
>>
>>Two related questions:
>>
>>1) Suppose we want to make some short clips from a larger, existing 
>>movie file for use in E-Prime.  What software would you recommend for this?
>>
>>2) Suppose we want to record our own movie clips from scratch for 
>>use in E-Prime.  What systems would you recommend for that?
>>
>>I might also reframe those questions as, "What did *you* use?" or, 
>>"What worked for *you*?"
>>
>>Note that the KB and online discussions have addressed at length 
>>how to get *existing* clips to work with E-Prime (installing codec 
>>libraries, etc.).  I instead want to avoid those problems by 
>>preparing our clips in the first place in a way that plays well 
>>with E-Prime "out-of-the-box".  Any advice?
>>
>>Thanks,
>>-- David McFarlane, Professional Faultfinder

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