http://www.swr.de/diefallers/

Download and installation

First go to the download page of Handbrake and chose from the downloads what fits you best. There are Windows, Mac and Linux builds. The Installation process should be self-explanatory. Now launch Handbrake. You will get a message that the built-in presets have to be updated. That’s fine, click okay.

Loading a video

Now we are ready to load the video file. Click on Source at the very upper left (1. in the screenshot). You will notice that you can chose between Video File and DVD/VIDEO_TS Folder. That’s pretty amazing  in case you get a DVD from your client. You can either copy the VIDEO_TS folder to your hard disk (much faster for converting) or convert directly from DVD. Although, keep in mind that Handbrake can only handle unprotected DVDs. 
When you have loaded your movie you will get a popup message telling you to specify a default path for the output files. You don’t have to do so, since you can always specify the filename including the path in the main screen of the GUI (2. in the screenshot). But in case you want to setup a  folder where all your converted videos should go by default, follow the screen instructions to set the path.

Video and audio settings

In Output Settings, right below Destination (2. in the screenshot), make sure that  the container format is set to mp4. Next, we take care of the video quality (3. in the screenshot). The Video Codec should be set to H.264 (x264), if not, do so. There are different strategies for the Quality setting. If you don’t care about file size and just need quick results, go for the Constant Quality option and set the quality level accordingly. The other two options (Target Size and Avg Bitrate) will give you the ability to enable 2-Pass encoding. This will result in smaller file sizes, since the whole footage is analyzed regarding its complexity and the encoder decides upon a logfile which scenes will need a lower or higher bitrate. You could compare this with the variable bitrate setting of the mp3 encoder. If you go for Target Size you can enter a desired size for the video, for example 2000MB or you chose Avg Bitrate and enter the desired average bitrate the encoder should use. Note, that the file size might still be a little lower or higher than 2000MB (maybe +/- 100 MB) since this is only an approximate value.

You should also take a look at the tab Picture. There you can change settings like resolution (in case you got a HD video and need to resize it for your DAW), or crop black borders.

That’s it for video. Let’s click on the Audio tab (4. in the screenshot). Here you can select the audio bitrate, samplerate, etc…  In general, there should be at least one audio track visible (unless the video has no audio) in the track list. If your client delivers a DVD with more than one language you might have more than one audio track. However, you can remove the tracks you don’t need by clicking on Remove. Select the audio track in the track list, chose AAC as Audio Codec and change the settings for Mixdown, Samplerate and Bitrate according your needs.

Disabling B- and P-frames

What we want to do now is turn off B- and P-frames. Therefore, click on the Advanced tab (5. in the screenshot) and disregard anything you see there and head directly to the command-line like input filed at the very bottom (6. in the screenshot). Delete its content and paste the following line:

mixed-refs=0:ref=0:bframes=0:weightb=0:keyint=1:min-keyint=1

Saving preset

To simplify things in the future, let’s save a preset with all the options we just set up. Go the presets section at the very right. Save your settings by clicking on the Add button (7. in the screenshot) on the lower right and give your  preset a name like “Cubase H264″, “Nuendo H264″, or “Cubendo H264″, etc…

Converting

Finally, fill in a file name for your video (Destination, 2. in the screenshot) and press the Start button (8. in the screenshot) to get the converting rolling. 
All you have to do now is wait until the encoder finished its work and you are done. Import into Cubendo and start composing!

If you encounter any problems while importing the video into Cubendo, (in Handbrake) go to Tools -> Options and uncheck “Always use iPod/iTunes friendly extensions (.m4v) for MP4″. Thanks to Jack for pointing this out!

Hope this tutorial solves some of the problems you guys had. Happy converting!

More info and sound examples can be found here

You ought to know that all these modern videos formats people use nowadays, take advantage of very sophisticated compression tricks. One of them is the use of P-frames and B-frames (more info here). In contrast to I-frames (also called key-frames), where the picture information is stored independently in each I-frame, P- and B-frames only contain the picture data that has changed since the last I-frame. 
As you can see, with this method it is no longer necessary to save each frame individually. This results in less data and therefore a smaller video file. But since the frames need to be calculated in real time, this procedure also makes it very CPU intensive and almost impossible to scrub through a video file without hiccups (even more if your DAW is fully loaded with virtual instruments). And of course that’s exactly what film composer and sound designer need to do when working with videos.

The alternative formats I used in Nuendo 3/4 were M-JPEG (the movie is saved as a JPEG-sequence) and DV. Both consist of key-frames only. I found that DV never really worked for me, so that I ultimately ended up with M-JPEG in a mov container. Of course this format still works well , but I wasn’t quite satisfied with two aspects:

1. the video file gets really big (depending on the JPEG quality up to 5GB for 45 minutes of film)
2. Quicktime always had problems with numerous input formats. This resulted in additional encoding sessions with other tools. Very time consuming if you are in a hurry to score a movie.

So with the release of the new improved video engine in Cubendo, I went on a quest for a better codec and after some testing I found H264 to work very well. H264 also makes use of sophisticated compression methods such as P-frames and B-frames. But the cool thing is, you can completely turn them off and let H264 operate in the I-frame-only-mode, which is exactly what we want. Additionally, many graphics cards support H264 acceleration. Now, since we know which codec we want to use, we need a video encoder that will do the job for us. The best and most versatile video encoder I found to date is Avidemux. It literally almost reads every input video format (check here for a list of supported formats), is open source and cross platform. This makes it the perfect tool for this task and is the only thing we need for this tutorial. Grab it here, unpack/ install and then execute it. The GUI is pretty straightforward and self-explanatory, for our purpose anyway. First click on File -> Open to load the video you want to convert. The video should show in Avidemux. Now have a look at the screenshot below. The three sections take care of the output settings. By default video and audio are set to Copy and format to AVI. This is not what we want for H264.

First, change the format box from AVI to MP4 (not MP4 PSP!). MP4 is the default container format for H264. For the Audio settings it’s a bit a matter of taste. The official audio format for H264 is AAC, but the video engine of Cubendo doesn’t really care what audio format you use. For the sake of not making the sound worse by re-encoding it, you can just leave it (Copy). If you don’t care and just want to have a smaller video file, set Copy to AAC (Faac). Then click on the Configure button and set the bitrate to your desired value. I would go for a setting above 128 kbps.

Now let’s go to the most important part, the video settings. Click on Copy, chose MPEG-4 AVC and click on Configure. In the first tab General we chose the Encoding Mode. By default this should be set to Constate Rate Factor (Single Pass). With this setting you can get good and fast results however I advise you to go for a Two Pass encoding like Video Size (Two Pass) or Average Bitrate (Two Pass) because this results in a better overall encoding (quality/size). During the first-pass the encoder analyzes the complexity of the video material and saves this data into a log file. Only in the second-pass the video is actually encoded, based on the log file. If you want to keep the size of the video on a certain level, then you go for Video Size (Two Pass) and enter the desired value in Target Video Size, for example 2000 MB. But if you want to retain an average video quality level, you go for Average Bitrate (Two Pass). In this mode the maximum bitrate will be the value that you enter in the Average Bitrate field, whereas in less complex scenes the codec will chose a lower bitrate.

That’s it for this tab. Let’s move on to the Frame tab. This is where we tell the encoder not to use P- and B-frames. Apply the settings according the screenshot below:

You should now save these settings as a template. On the top of the dialog click on Save As and enter
an appropriate name.

That’s all you need to change in the video settings. Click OK to close the dialog. You’re now ready to start encoding. Go to File -> Save -> Save Video and type in a name for the video file.
Avidemux starts immediately with the encoding process. This can take up to several hours, depending on your machine, length of the video and chosen bitrate settings. As reference: I encoded a 45-minute documentation in like 20-30 minutes on Quad with a desired video size of 800MB. Avidemux (the x264 codec) is able to make use of multicore CPUs. This usually results in a very quick encoding on these machines.

When the encoding is done, all you have to do is fire up Cubendo and import the video file. Done!

More info about the movie at the festival page

With the official launch of stephanroemer.net I also released TotalKeyMix. Now you know, why it all took so long

With this Windows tool you can control the main volume of any RME soundcard (that uses TotalMix) via hotkeys. For example you can assign the multimedia keys (volume up, volume down, mute) or any other key combination you prefer.

Check here for more details:
http://www.stephanroemer.net/downloads/totalkeymix/

Cheers,

Stephan

Working on a Windows tool, that allows you to control the volume of TotalMix (RME soundcards) with your computer keyboard. I recently bought a Griffin PowerMate and it worked out of the box with my tool. Stay tuned for more! Release date wont be too far away.

Here’s a first screenshot. It looks very unspectacular but it does its job

Here you can listen to the full cue: