How to use The FilmMachine

How to use The FilmMachine:

What do you need?

Everything is included in The FilmMachine package, you only need Cinema Craft Encoder SP 2.5, 2.66, 2.67 or Canopus Procoder for encoding the video. Because these are commercial programs they are not included. You must install the video encoder prior to starting The FilmMachine.
The FilmMachine was tested on computers with Windows XP/2000.

Purpose

I wrote The FilmMachine because I wanted to convert my downloaded AVI-files to DVD or (S)VCD without using all sort of single programs.
Now I know that DVD2SVCD does the job very good , but I don't like the many options that you can choose. That's why I wrote a wizard like program wich does the j 22522v212w ob very easily.

How to use

One often overlooked process when making a DVD or (S)VCD from a AVI source is to make sure the AVI has no errors or sync problems; If you don't fix errors in the AVI file your encoded MPEG will most likely have sync problems or other errors in it.
Prior for using The FilmMachine make sure your AVI-file is free of errors. For example you can use or DivFix to check your AVI for video errors.

Step 1. Opening AVI-files

Before you can continue with The FilmMachine you must open one or more AVI-files. If you want to open more than one AVI-file they must have the same properties (for example a movie can consist of more than one file when it contains AC3 audio). Once the movie is loaded you see some information about the movie.

Step 2. Output options

After clicking the next button you can choose the directory where you want to save your created DVD or (S)VCD.
The next option is to select the output format. Choose Mpeg 2 (DVD or SVCD) for better quality or Mpeg 1 (VCD) for lower quality.
You then must choose a video encoder. Currently you can choose Quenc 0.51 by Nic (free encoder still in development and included in the package), Cinema Craft Encoder SP versions 2.50, 2.66 or 2.67 and Canopus Procoder.

Then you can select the aspect ratio (see step 3).

If your dvd-player or tv only can handle PAL movies then you should check the NTSC to PAL option.

If you want to downsample your audio you can check the downsample option and for AVI to DVD conversion you can choose the audio language, so you can see it in the DVD menu.

Step 3. Aspect Ratio

For the aspect ratio there are 2 options depending on the desired TV system (4:3 or 16:9). Than you can choose 3 different settings for each aspect ratio.

The first is "Fullscreen", this just resizes the video to 720x576 or 720x480 (or the other resolutions if doing (S)VCD). This option can result in deformation.

The second is "Add borders, keep aspect ratio", this means add horizontal or vertical borders to mantain aspect ratio (horizontal if the source aspect ratio is greater then the final, vertical if it is not. This will display the entire video frame with borders.

The third is "Crop video, keep aspect ratio", this means crop the video so that there will be no borders, but the aspect ratio will be kept. This will allow for example to put a 16:9 frame inside a 4:3 box cropping the left and right portions of the frame, like in TV.

The FilmMachine will try to choose the best option depending on the aspect ratio of the AVI-file, but you can change this yourself. Also you can edit the Avisynth script as first part of the conversion process to type your own settings, but you must know what you are doing.

Step 4. Video Bitrate and Image creation

In this window you can select the size of your cd or dvd and the amount of cd's you want to make. Normally you can make a VCD on 1 or more cd's and a SVCD on 2 or more cd's. You can also select a audio bitrate that TFM should use.

If you don't want to create images of the encoded movie you can select the checkbox 'Don't make images'.

If you choose to make a DVD the form looks like this:

Step 5. Subtitles

The FilmMachine can make permanent and selectable (only for DVD) subtitles in your DVD or (S)VCD movies. You can select a subtitle in the following formats: *.srt and *.sub. You can choose the same number of subtitles as your AVI-files, The FilmMachine will merge the subtitles together when you have more than one subtitle file.

Also you can select an subtitle language (only noticable when you choose selectable subtitles) and choose a few options for displaying the subtitles.

Step 6. Start conversion process

In this screen you can start the conversion progress and you can see what TFM is doing. This process will take some time, so at best you can start it when you go to sleep.

Step 6 Burning the image

When The FilmMachine has finished converting to (S)VCD you wil find a directory named "images" in your selected output directory. In this directory there are "bin" and "cue" files that you can directly burn onto cd with for example Nero.

If you selected DVD as Cd size, burning will be done automatically (Nero must be installed on your computer to use this). Just make sure you put a DVD-R(W) in your DVD-burner.

Changing some options

You also can change some options in The FilmMachine, these options are:

• The number of passes CCE encodes, less passes means lower video quality but also takes less time to encode.
• The quality of encoding with Canopus Procoder.
• The number of passes Canopus Procoder encodes, 1-pass or 2-passes.
• The quality of encoding with Quenc.
• 2-pass encoding for Quenc.

Also you must fill in the paths where the video encoders are installed on your computer.

Also you change some other options.