For the last 9 months, I've been creating a music video. Obtained much software; learned a lot about making all this come together. Now I am down to the point of optimizing the audio, since that is the key to this production. ULead V7 has a hidden setting and with careful monitoring, you can force a straight forward conversion of the audio without the Psycoacoustics [default is model 2]. You can also use the Quantizing settings for the video and all the blockyness on the monitor disappears on a TV, and begins to look almost like a 3D animation. All the video was screen captured from WinAmp AVS's designed for each song. TIP: Play the song at half speed and capture the video. Then encode at 2X speed. No dropped frames using {Uuuhhhggg] Microsoft's Windooze media encoder SDK. Capturing only 352x240 pixels and no audio [duh]. For the amount of motion this delivers, these came out excellent on a P4 2.4. After mixing the capture with various other formats, AVI, TGA, and effects, the MPG-1 conversion of the video was sweet and fully compliant. As for the audio, this is where the question finally comes in: I have high quality waves which convert just ok to MPG1-L2. There seems to be some real magic concerning the volume levels and the higher freq's. Is it possible that encoding the music from the source to MP3 first, then making the complient MPG1-L2 Audio from the MP3, that the quality would improve? ...and where might one find such an encoder? **To finish the story out... ULead Video Studio does an amazing job of quality conversions IF! you make sure the settings don't change between the conversions. ULead's plug-in DVD/VCD burner will skip further encoding if the MPG's are complient. Which means encode the audio with the video verifying the SAME settings of each in the conversion options to an MPG1 video file [1150/224]. Then drag and drop the final MPG's to the included DVD/CD plug-in. Also remember to fade In/out your audio. This will help keep the audio from 'popping' when it comes on at the splices. Add this line to your UVS.ini file in the AllUser's folder (windooze xp) right under [VIODRIVER]: ADVANCE=1 This will give you 5 pages of settings. Remember to check these setting every! time if not twice. ULead's s/w is extremely tempremental. Please don't forget about my questions in the middle somewhere. :)

-- Tom Dee (abdesign@teleport.com), December 07, 2003

Answers

No, it's not possible that converting WAV files to MP3 to MPEG 1 Layer II audio will improve things. In fact, it should make them worse! Both MP3 and MPEG audio are lossy codecs, which mean that they throw away audio information to reduce file size. You can convert directly from WAV to MPEG audio with the program BeSweet. Go to http://www.doom9.net and look in the Downloads section. You might want to get the GUI based version of the program as it's a lot easier to use. Warning - BeSweet sometimes has problems with AC3 conversion, both to and from AC3. While that is not what you are trying to do, BeSweet can be used to do this kind of conversion and I just wanted to warn you that it's buggy. Converting WAV to MPEG audio or vice versa has no problems.

-- Root (root@yahoo.moc), December 08, 2003.