What to do with Camcorder DV Video?
Batch Encoding with DubMan
Launch DubMan.
We’re going to add two jobs to the job list, one for the first pass and one for the second.
Click on “Add Job”, this displays the dialog below – fill in the fields roughly as shown:
Job Title: Any name you like – I went for “XVID First Pass”
Input File: Use the browse button to select a file in the directory where all your source avi files live. If you then replace the filename with something like *.avi (as shown above) it will pick up any avi file in the directory.
Output File: Use the browse button here to select an output directory. If the filename at the end of the path is then replaced with *.avi again, the processor will reuse whatever filename is fed through from the * in the Input File field. You can take it further by setting it to be something like *out.avi which would use the original name but postfix it with “out” for example.
The “Audio” and “Run Program” tabs you can leave alone, but we do need to edit the “AviSynth” tab.
This is essentially the avisynth script that we created earlier, but with the filename replaced with %1
Click OK to close that dialog and then click on “Bulk Configuration” to select the avi files that you want to process.
I use “File Selection” and using the “Add Files” button to select all the avi files that I want to process. If I could have got the wildcard selection method to work, I’d have gone with that – but File Selection works well enough.
And we’re done.
Before running the job – save your template away using the main dialog (select “File – Save”) – for reuse later.
Finally click “Run Jobs File” – and then leave your machine for about a day and you should have a disk full of compressed converted files between a quarter and a fifth of the size of the originals and pretty much the same quality. Easier to move around, backup, play across a network, archive whatever.
I hope this has been intelligible and indeed, helpful to someone!