I’ve been editing together a few gameplay videos recently (eg DayZ Tread Lightly).I came across a rather perplexing error when trying to encode a long video. Basically, I have a few sequences of footage taken with FRAPS that together run to about 2 hours and 45 minutes. I created a project for these to run together as a reference for what a typical DayZ session might look like. I also produced a highlights version which is about 1 hour and 8 minutes long. After the latter, the oddness began.
The first uncut set of footage encoded without issues, coming at around 20GB at a high bitrate. The upload of this to YouTube failed after 40 hours, so I decided to re-encode at a slightly saner bitrate and put in a fancy title rather than the overlaid title cards. Before queuing that to encode, I finished off the highlights video, which has sections sped up (between ~800-1700%) to get rid of the boring stuff. Heres where the encoding problems began.
Encoding the highlights clip took much longer than expected, and it seemed to encode further than the 1hr 8min mark up to 2 hr 45 mins (the uncut length). Subsequently, the encoding of the sightly-modified uncut video produced a file that wouldn’t play. Trying various permutations of codec settings wouldnt produce playable files. None of VLC, ffmpeg or medinfo could identify the problem videos.
Producing short clips (eg a 2 minute sample) from either video worked fine, so I split the highlights video into 10-minute segments to see if there was a problem in a section of the timeline. All segments encoded normally, which was a surprise. What was a bigger surprise was that using Premiere to concatenate those clips failed with a similar problem!
At that stage I gave up on getting these videos to work in Premiere. Other videos, eg my Lets Play of FTL worked fine in the interim. Im now using a frameserver to serve videos to MeGUI to encode using x264. Details will hopefully follow if it works.