MPEGstreamclip question

[Chad M. Bell]

What setting do I have to use to make a clip compatible with Pinnacle? I'm selling this camera to my friend and when I do the straight conversion to MPEG, it works great in Media player but there is no sound when I import it to Power Director. I know Power Director stinks but it uses MPEG audio and the conversion doesn't allow PD to recognize any audio at all and I dont know what Pinnacle uses for audio. When I use the export to quick time function, the video and audio are out of sink. Little frustrated. I guess what I really need to know is what will he have to do to make it work with Pinnacle using MPEGStreamclip? Thanks guys!!!

[Manuel Correa]

Hello Chad

OK Chad, I'm a little confused since you are mentioning 2 different programs in your question.

If you still have the Power Director program that came with the Everio, you do not need to use MPEGStreamclip. Power Director will read the .TOD files from your camera and also convert them to .MPG files for you. The files can be read by either Power Director or Pinnacle Studio.

MPEGStreamclip could be used to convert your .TOD video files to Quicktime .MOV, .AVI files, MPEG-4, H-264 files, etc if you wish. It has more choices than Power Director. MPEGStreamclip is an alternative encoder program to use. The default settings should be fine. In the Exporter window, be sure the sound selection says 'YES' or an MPEG Layer is chosen as 'No Sound' is also a possible choice for some of the compression schemes. If you select the 'Options' button at the top of the exporter window, the sound check box should also be selected. Although it may be obvious, but it can be overlooked, make sure you do not have the audio track muted in the NLE you are using when playing the videos back.

MPEGStreamclip is mentioned as a program to convert .TOD files to another format that an NLE can read. I have used it and encountered no problems with the files created being read by Pinnacle Studio, Sony Vegas and Movie Studio as well. The standard .AVI choice is usually best and does not create any problems.

Pinnacle Studio will read either .MPG or .AVI files with no problem. Pinnacle Studio cannot read the video files created by the Everio, as Studio does not have native .TOD file support. Studio Version 12 was to include .TOD support, but right now it is not supported as this time. It will probably be included in an update or patch to version 12. As for those with Version 11, well . . . it was reported it too would be updated, but right now I would say, don't count on it.

As for the audio/video sync issue, compressed files like .MPG, .MOV, .WMV can have timeline sync issues when editing. Most of the time converting the files to .AVI will give you better results. Another instance is when burning to disc, this is usually caused by re-compression.



Hope this helps and maybe answered your questions.

[Chad M. Bell]

Perfect! Thank you so much! Sorry for the confusion. I was using Power Director to convert to MPEG to edit for my personal use and obviously wasnt too happy with it. My friend that I am selling this camera to has Pinnacle so I was doing a test run with mpegstreamclip to see how it works so I can show him how easy it is as a selling point. :) So I ran the clips straight from the camera through mpegstreamclip and walla, much faster and easier conversion to than when using PD. So when I clicked on the file raw without any editor open, media player played it beautifully with audio and I was mad that I hadn't been doing this all along. So for the heck if it, I opened Power Director (the only editor I have)and imported the files. The video was fine but there was no audio at all and I checked that it wan't muted. So my concern was that when I take this to my friend to try it out, he will see beautiful video without audio and not be impressed. He is using Pinnacle as his NLE so I wasn't sure it would work with that editor. Sound will be important to him as he will be using this cam for racing interviews. This is what I was doing with stream clip. ADD FILES> (selected the SD_VIDEO and destination...)> then just clicked CONVERT TO MPEG> then GO. I didn't go the "export to quick time" route to convert to .MOV and maybe I have to. So, could you give me a one sentence workflow in streamclip (using windows) that will give him the correct and best conversion to edit with Pinnacle? I would really appreciate it. Sorry for the long explanation, but I hope that clears up what I was trying to do. I can't thank you enough for helping out with this!!!

[Manuel Correa]

Hello Chad

Alright, as I mentioned on the previous post it is very simple and the default settings will work without any problem. I don't know that I can give it to you in 1 sentence, others on here will tell you, forget it, as I try to explain as best as I can.

Before I go into it, a question. I take it you still have the original discs that came with the camera. Since you are selling the camera to a friend, I assume you will be giving this person all the discs as well? The reason I mention it is because they may find the Power Director program fits their use very well. It may not be the best, and loads slowly, but the coding was written to support this camera, is quite easy to use, and the GUI is similar to Pinnacle Studio.

MPEGStreamclip is a good solid program and has many conversion features. For some, the more options that are available or can be chosen, the harder it may be for them to figure out. It's kind of an overload, too much stuff. Some people just want something simple to use without all the bells and whistles. Just a passing thought.

I won't go into filing structures as each person needs to do what they feel is best to keep track of files on their hard drive. I will use 1 file, MOV001.TOD, in the following example and create 2 folders on my hard drive. One is called EVERIO TOD, the other STREAMCLIP.

Turn on the PC and allow Windows to boot up completely.

Have the camera powered via AC and the USB cable connected to the camera.

Connect the other end of the USB cable to the PC then turn on the camera. Wait while Windows sees the attached device. Windows will treat the cameras hard drive as an external drive.

Go to the directory PRG001 on the camera, there you will find all the video clips that have been saved such as MOV001.TOD, etc.

Choose the clip you want and copy it to the PC hard drive directory EVERIO TOD.

Now, start MPEGStreamclip, choose FILE, OPEN FILES and navigate to the EVERIO TOD directory to pick the clip you saved previously and choose OPEN. The video clip should open in the MPEGStreamclip window.

Choose FILE from the menu. In the drop down window you will see several choices. Click on CONVERT TO MPEG. A new window will open CREATE NEW MPG FILE. The file name that is currently on the main MPEGStreamclip window will be listed below. You can keep it the same or rename the file, which ever you wish.

Go to the upper window and navigate to the STREAMCLIP directory created before. Click SAVE and MPEGStreamclip will convert and save the file as MOV001.MPG. You will see a progress window open above and a complete message when the process is completed.

You have successfully converted your .TOD file to a .MPG file. You are done.

From here you can open Pinnacle Studio, navigate to the STREAMCLIP directory, choose the MOV001.MPG file, play it, and/or place it on the time line for editing.

A simple conversion from .TOD to .MPG will be fast and the file size will be slightly smaller as no encoding is done to the file itself.


Other choices are available in the FILE pull down, such as EXPORT to AVI, EXPORT to Quicktime, etc. Based on a quality setting of 80% and a video of 1920x1080 16:9 interlaced, the .AVI conversion will take longer as the file needs to be encoded and will be about 6 times as large as the original .TOD file. The Quicktime .MOV will take even longer, and produce a file about 7 times larger than the original. The higher the quality the longer the conversion and larger the resulting file. As a side note, Pinnacle Studio does not support .MOV files.

As I mentioned in the beginning, MPEGStreamclip does provide many options such as varying screen sizes, the compression codec and its quality settings, sound date rate, frame rate, deinterlacing, batch processing, etc. To use the additional features, you need to experiment to see what works best for your needs.

This is basically the setup I use.

I told you! One sentence, I don't think so!

I hope all of this helps.

All the best!

[Chad M. Bell]

Thank you so much! That was perfect and solves all my problems. I wasn't trying to be rude by saying one sentence, I hope you didn't take it that way. I was trying to not be a pain in your a$$. I was already somewhat familiar with streamclip and as you know there seems to be a million different combinations of conversions possible that I'm not so familiar with. I am deeply grateful for the help and thank you for the time you put in to helping me. See ya! - Chad