To HD, or not to HD

[mirkosp]

Well, if it's a dreamworks cg movie it's likely it's legit 1080p, then.
But, it's mostly about scaling back to 720 and then again to 1080 and checking the original not scaled frame for detail differences. Very slight sharpness differences will occur since resampling is lossy in most cases (unless you're upsampling and downsampling back with pointresize at power of 2 resolutions), however if you don't notice real detail differences, then it's definitely an upscale.
It might sound easy like this, but it's kinda tricky until your eye gets used to seeing upscales and recognizing them. After a while, though, you'd prolly be able to tell what the original resolution was without the need to scale back and forth again, but just with a quick glance.

[slackergirl]

I'm done editing my video. It took me longer to get the source ready than to actually make it! But I did it, thanks to all of you! I have 1 more question: for my credits at the end I want to use a little snippet of the movie audio. I know how to demux a wav file from an avi in virtualdub, but I didn't make my ginormous avi with the audio. Also, I don't have the license key for DGDecNV yet. Is there an easier way to get it from the m2ts file rather than re-encoding as an mkv with audio and then converting THAT to an avi with audio and then demuxing THAT? Or should I just wait for the license key?

Oh, I thought of another question! In the old amv app there was a GUI for converting audio files between different formats, included I believe primarily to fix sync issues in Premiere since it edits 24fps and not truly 23.97 (does it still do that? I don't have Premiere...). I used it for a few other things, but lost it with my old hard drive, and it doesn't seem to be in the newer app. I also forget what it's called, was it the LAME GUI? So does anyone know where I can get it? And if not, what would you use to convert an mp3 to a wav file?

[BasharOfTheAges]

It was the besweet GUI. It's not compatible with a lot of newer versions of Windows. That might be why it's no longer included.

[slackergirl]

That's the one! I'm running good ol' XP still, not these new-fangled OS's you kids use... Crazy kids!

[BasharOfTheAges]

it would be rather irresponsible to include software that no longer works for the majority of users in an application for the majority of users.

[mirkosp]

It was also pretty bad, imho.
Regardless, the best way to get audio converted out of an m2ts is with eac3to. It is a command line software, but there exist GUIs for it as standalones, so I'd suggest you to give it a shot.

[slackergirl]

Well, it did what I needed it to do, but I don't fault excluding it if it wasn't practical for most people. The audio on the ripped m2ts is messed up for some reason. I took the opportunity to try out MakeMKV to rip a better copy, and it was superior to AnyDVD in that I could choose what files to rip, and it actually came out looking very nice to my untrained eye. Trying to figure a way to pull it from that as we speak. Got eac3to, but it'll take some time getting it to work for me. That should work for an mkv file too, right? (That's what I gathered from the doom9 post on it anyway. I'm not savvy enough to actually understand most doom9 forum posts...) Dammit Jim I'm a doctor, not a computer programmer!

[Mister Hatt]

fb2k or, or even better, dbpoweramp, are excellent tools for audio conversion. libav has a whole heap of audio codecs too. Waiting for kshishkov to RE DTS-MA tho :V

[slackergirl]

Thanks Mister Hatt! I'll look into those for future use, but I actually figured it out! It took me almost as long to get 10 seconds worth of dialogue as it did to actually edit the video.