Handbrake - Coverting LagarithAVI to MP4 resluts in frame-freezes?

[TM2YC]

I just started using Handbrake this week and so far it's excellent (Once I realised you need to tick the 'Large File Size' box that is). But last night I left it rendering an MP4 version of an edited movie stored as a LagarithAVI.

This morning I took a look and was disapointed to see that on some fades (It might be other parts it's hard to tell) the image lingered too long over the next second of black frames (Almost like a rendered version of how lagging looks). I thought "damn the AVI must be wrong, I'll have to correct my timeline and render that back out of Vegas" but when I checked the AVI file, it looked perfect?

So Handbrake is getting confused about something. Anybody had a similar problem?

Here are some general settings I was using if that makes it clearer...

Picture Tab
Size - 1280x532 (Same as source)
Anamorphic - Loose
Modulus - 2
Cropping - Auto (None)
Filters Tab
All off
Video
Codec - H.264
Framerate - 23.976 / Constant (Same as source)
x264 Preset - Very Fast
x256 Tune - None
Fast Decode - Off
H.264 Profile - Main
H.264 Level - 4.0
Quality - Constant 15
Audio
AAC 320 48
Subtitles
Blank
Chapters
There are none but create chapter 1 is ticked
Advanced
Grey out

The film was 01.46.21 and resulted in an otherwise good looking 2.66GB file

 

[TV's Frink]

Thread moved to File Conversion.

 

[reave]

I had a similar problem with some trailers I made, though I don't remember if I was using handbrake at the time. My timeline looked perfect and my rendered lagarith avi was perfect, but when I converted it to a smaller format it made a weird "hang" at the tail end of some of the fades. I never did figure out why it was doing it, but I suspect there's a setting somewhere that auto-detects that fade. Sorry I'm no help in fixing it, but it's nice to see that I'm not the only person who has that issue.

 

[Neglify]

Reslut = to slut again

 

[TM2YC]

Reslut = to slut again

That's the kind of awesome spelling that should never be corrected :-D

I had a similar problem with some trailers I made. My timeline looked perfect and my rendered lagarith avi was perfect, but when I converted it to a smaller format it made a weird "hang" at the tail end of some of the fades.

Sounds like exactly the same thing. I've noticed other places it's doing it, all when there is a brief fade to black?!?

I'll try maxing out the encoding time to "Very Slow" or something, it couldn't make it worse. Perhaps letting handbrake handle the frame rate automatically might work better too?

 

[TV's Frink]

That's the kind of awesome spelling that should never be corrected :-D

It's an otherwise goo looking thread.

 

[TM2YC]

Tried a render on... very-slow, 6000kbps-average instead of constant-quality and let Handbrake adjust framerate to match source. It took half a day to render and had the same freezing-on-fades-to-black issue only this time Handbrake self-selected 11.988011 as the the best framerate! :x (Made it look like a silent movie which was interesting but not helpful).

When I rendered an MP4 straight out of Vegas it had none of these issues but the image quality was very poor in comparison. Sigh.

 

[ThrowgnCpr]

megui

 

[Aztek463]

megui

This. I've never had a bad output from MeGUI.

 

[TM2YC]

This. I've never had a bad output from MeGUI.

I've never managed to get an output from MeGUI nevermind a good or bad one. But in the absense of another plan I'll try again.

Is there a thread with an idiot's guide to using MeGUI on here? A forum search of "MeGUI" suggests there isn't? I can't even see an option to open my AVI file, nevermind how to convert it to MP4.

 

[reave]

It's seemingly related to how certain programs handle lagarith. When I took my rendered trailer that had the pausing issue and dropped it into Vegas it played correctly.

 

[TM2YC]

I tried MeGUI and got a nice looking 4.3GB mp4 file, after it spent the best part of a day encoding (I had to reinstall MeGUI to get it working for some reason). I'm also not sure why it spent several hours creating a 70GB mkv file first, then paused and displayed a popup asking if I wanted to convert it to YV12 colourspace (I clicked yes), then spent several more hours creating the mp4. It didn't include the audio stream which was annoying and I don't understand since I thought I'd checked all the relevant settings under audio.

Perhaps having the Lagarith file rendered in the default RGB colourspace is what was causing Handbrake to encode it wrong? I'll be sure to switch the Lagarith settings to YV12 in future in any case.

Now I just need to extract the audio stream from the AVI and figure out how to combine it with the good mp4 encode.

 

[theslime]

Muxing an audio-less MP4 with an audio file should be a walk in the park, i.e. the hard part is over. MP4 Box is probably the best tool for what you need, but since you seem command-line-averse (no offence intended!), I'd recommend this graphical utility for the job.

 

[ThrowgnCpr]

Perhaps having the Lagarith file rendered in the default RGB colourspace is what was causing Handbrake to encode it wrong? I'll be sure to switch the Lagarith settings to YV12 in future in any case.

It has to be in RGB to edit in Vegas, unless they changed that with the newest versions.

there is also a really easy GUI built into meGUI for muxing an MP4. Look under the tools menu

 

[TM2YC]

Muxing an audio-less MP4 with an audio file should be a walk in the park, i.e. the hard part is over. MP4 Box is probably the best tool for what you need, but since you seem command-line-averse (no offence intended!), I'd recommend this graphical utility for the job.

I'll keep that in mind thanks as the following seems to have sorted it...

It has to be in RGB to edit in Vegas, unless they changed that with the newest versions.

there is also a really easy GUI built into meGUI for muxing an MP4. Look under the tools menu

Thanks that did the trick . It's frustrating when I had a quick, easy and user friendly pipeline sorted, then trying to figure out new programs when I know I could have done it minutes before. But the results I've got are nothing short of fantastic, there is barely any difference between the original 71.5GB AVI and the finished 4.6GB MP4! The difference in the quality between what I used to get and what I rendered today, is night and day, so thanks again for the help people.

Now I need to find a free DVD/Blu-Ray creator tool that I like.

 

[ThrowgnCpr]

It's frustrating when I had a quick, easy and user friendly pipeline sorted, then trying to figure out new programs when I know I could have done it minutes before. But the results I've got are nothing short of fantastic, there is barely any difference between the original 71.5GB AVI and the finished 4.6GB MP4! The difference in the quality between what I used to get and what I rendered today, is night and day, so thanks again for the help people.

awesome. And you can almost guarantee that any super-easy one-click GUI application is not going to provide the best results. There is a small learning curve with meGUI, but the results are fantastic.

Now I need to find a free DVD/Blu-Ray creator tool that I like.

Since you're now a Vegas user, I highly recommend DVD Architect. Great stuff, although admittedly, I'm just jumping into Blu-ray authoring.

 

[TM2YC]

Since you're now a Vegas user, I highly recommend DVD Architect. Great stuff, although admittedly, I'm just jumping into Blu-ray authoring.

Great tip, I got a copy and have made quite a nice DVD. Finally a program that can do everything my old program could do... and about a hundred things it couldn't!

Thanks again.