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What's new in DVdate 5.3.x
DVdate 5.3.x
has been first published
on 2005, September the 17th. lt features some
great innovations requested by many users, improving
the advanced features from version
5.0. It is warmly recommended to upgrade
to 5.3.x with a full installation in order to
benefit from them.
The widescreen format 16x9 is recognized:
DVdate 5.3.x recognizes
now the format 4x3 or 16x9 from
DV videos. These videos have a special characteristic: the
size of image in the frame is not the size
to be displayed in reality. The size of
image is always 720x576 in Pal or 720x480 in NTSC,
but has to be displayed in 4x3 or in 16x9
proportions. DVdate 5.3.x
indicates now the relevant ratio among its
informations about the video and keeps
it through its different operations.
The datecode is kept in the recompressed
videos:
Generally,
when a DV
video is recompressed, all data about datecode
or timecode is deleted. That's what happened
in
DVdate 5.0 for instance when inlaying the
datecode into the video. DVdate 5.3.x
now is able to copy the original datecode into
the new frame and keeps it.
This is an exceptional feature. I do not
know one single software, even commercial,
able to do that. DVdate 5.3.x keeps
also the timecode. But when recompressing
from Pal to NTSC or from NTSC to Pal the
timecode has not much sense. It is thus
not kept (Reminder:
the timecode indicates the position of a
frame on the DV tape, but the new NTSC frame
has not really a corresponding original
Pal frame, because the number of frames
per second has been modified).
The position of datecode inlay is adjustable:
Many users
requested to be able to modify the position
of inlay in the video image. Its was specially
needed for making DVD's, because the inlay
was sometimes truncated on the TV. This
feature is now included in DVdate 5.3.x. To
change the position, click right on the
video screen to get its popup contextual
menu,
and choose Modify
the position of inlay.
Two sliders will be displayed to help adjusting
the inlay position.
In this
situation a simple left click on the video
screen
moves the inlay to the position of the click. When
finished, the command Hide
the sliders for inlay goes
back to normal display.
You may fix the datecode inside a
DV video in order to compensate a time difference:
When travelling abroad,
I often miss to set the internal clock of
my camcorder to local time. The videos
have thus a datecode which is not the real
time of catching them.
DVdate 5.3.x features a
command to fix it simply.
In the menu Convert there
is a command Fix
a time difference.
This command uses the time difference to
be set in the Settings page
(F10) and creates a new file called xxx_hor+5.avi for
example if the time difference is + 5 hours
on a file called xxx.avi. The new file has
exactly the same characteristics than the
old one, only the datecode has been fixed. There
is no quality loss.
You may change the codec of an AVI file:
In some circumstances,
it may be useful to change the FourCC (four
character code) of the codec, in order to
use the video with a proprietary codec for
some application. For instance, you change
XVID
to divX
in order to play
the file in some divX player. Or you may
fix the codec of some DV files having not
dvsd,
but dsvd
or even the Canopus codec CDVC.
These compression codecs are all variants
of the MJPG
codec and can be decoded with the different
flavors of the codec.
Unicode characters are better supported:
Asian languages use mainly
Unicode characters and not ASCII characters.
DVdate tries now to support them
in order to be able to display names of
files written in these languages. If you
are a user of one of these languages, please
let me know if it works, and even better
send me a screen capture showing the display
of Asian languages in DVdate. I must
say that I had interesting e-mail conversations
with some Chinese guys. They have been
stopped brutally and I am no more able to
receive or send messages to China.
DVdate 5.3.x frees the CPU time when idle:
In DVdate 5.0 there was
an active thread even when DVdate
seemed to do nothing. Some users were concerned
by the fact that DVdate seemed to use 100% of CPU
time (or 50% in Hyperthreading mode).
This has been fixed in DVdate 5.3.x.
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What's new in DVdate
5.0
DVdate
5.0 is a major update of DVdate 4.2. The
main improvements are:
A better user interface :
It features an improved
user interface with continuous display of
the selected video.
There is no more need to toggle between
the video display and the playlist display, both
being visible if more than one file is
loaded. If you prefer, you may nevertheless
hide the playlist with F6.
The commands are now located
in a main menu. They remain available via
keyboard shortcuts, but are no more available
with right clicks in popup menus, reserved
for specialized functions depending on the
click area. Notice that some shortcuts have
been changed, for
example CTRL+H to
display RIFF header
instead of CTRL+A. The complete list of
commands and keyboard shortcuts is available
in the Settings panel
(F10) under
the tab
"Commands". A
status bar is shown at the bottom of the
window and shows if a command is being processed.
You may load a great number
of AVI files in the playlist and even with
one key
(CTRL+F7) load ALL
AVI FILES
present on all hard disks of a computer. The menu Files features
many methods to open AVI files, either directly
by filename, or by opening entire folders, or
by opening a "playlist", text
file compatible with the
m3u format, containing a list of
files with their paths. The list of open
files may be sorted by alphabetical order, by
datecodes, by file size or by last modified
date of files.
When files are loaded
in its
playlist, one may apply a command to them,
either individually, or by selecting
some of them (with Shift+array on
the keyboard,
or with Shift+Click), or by selecting
them all. The commands are thus very flexible. In particular, there
is no more command like"Convert
all files": instead you select
all files (by
CTRL+A or
the button  ) and
apply the command to them.
Warning:
when you select one or several files in
the playlist,
the commands available change according
to the chosen files. For example, if it's
an AVI DV
file of type 1, then the command Convert to
DV type 2 is
enabled. But if it's an AVI DV file of type 2, then
the command Convert
to DV type1 will
be enabled. Or if it's not a DV file, or
even if the video has no datecode in its
first frame, then the commands to rename
the file with datecode are not shown.
Playing a video is easier: the
Space
bar plays or pauses
the selected video.
Full screen is available with the key ALT+Enter according
to habits of Microsoft. You
may seek with frame precision in the video
with CTRL+arrow
key. (If you hit
an arrow key without CTRL, then it is a
adressed
to the list). Notice that the timecodes are
now more precisely given than in DVdate
4.2 where some issues remained, specially
with DV of type 1 files.
New
commands:
Open with
ImageGrab: opens
ImageGrab with the selected
file,
and lets you extract images in bmp or
jpg format.
Modify
the video FPS:
fixes the framerate of the video in
the header of an AVI file (except DV type1), For
instance if the capture board estimated
it to 24,95
images per seconds, chances are you
got to set it
to 25 in order to resolve synchronization
issues.
Remove
the file: removes
files from the playlist,
without deleting them from the hard
disk. If you want to delete from
hard disk, type Shift+del
to throw them
to the Recycle Bin, at least if their
size is not too big for that.
Menu
Rename:
Shorten
the name: removes
all suffixes
added to the filename, like "_type1"
or "_ntsc".
Modify
the filedate:
replaces the creation and modification
date of the file in Windows with
the first datecode of the video.
Menu
Convert:
Recompress
to DV type 2:
creates a DV type 2 file from any AVI non DV
file, for instance a MJPG or
DivX.
Convert
to NTSC: converts
a DV Pal file to DV NTSC. This function is
enabled only if the Pinnacle's Deinterlacer
Video filter is installed. Caution, the
resulting video will be deinterlaced.
Convert
to Pal: converts
a DV NTSC file to a DV Pal. This function is
enabled only if the Pinnacle's Deinterlacer
Video filter is installed. Caution, the
resulting video will be deinterlaced.
Inlay datecode:
creates a file where in each frame the
current datecode is incrusted. This function
is only enabled if Paul Glagla's filters
have been installed during a full installation
of DVdate.
Extract
audio to WAV: creates
a WAV file with the sound track of
the selected videos. This function
is only enabled if Microsoft's
filter WAVDest
is installed on your system (it is
installed during a full installation
of DVdate 5.0)
.
Menu
Scenes:
Delete
the scn file:
deletes the scene files
(*.scn) associated with the selected
video files, if any.
Export
the scenes to text:
creates a text file containing the following
data for each scene in the video:
*
its number
*
the timestamp of the start
*
the timestamp of the end
*
the datecode
*
the timecode
*
the duration
This text file, where
data is separated by commas,
may be imported in tables or databases for
instance Excel.
Personalize
the settings:
DVdate 5.0 features
a Settings
panel (with key F10)
where you may personalize some aspects of
its behavior, disable some commands if
you don't plan to use them,
choose display formats for datecode,
set the default folders.
DVdate 5.0
may add a shortcut to the command "Send
To" of Windows Explorer and
permit to open directly an AVI file in DVdate
with a single right click on it.
An installation program:
DVdate 5.0
is delivered with an installation program.
It copies the needed files to the hard disk,
adds a shortcut to the Start menu
and optionally on the Desktop. It makes
a full installation with
the directshow
filters compulsory for inlay of datecode
and audio extraction.
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How to install and launch
DVdate