MartinOgg.com » Technical skills

Owning and Driving an LPG modified car.

admin — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 23:20:32 +0000

I’d like to give my experiences with buying and using an LPG car. The advantages are cheaper fuel and road tax and its better for the environment. Having a conversion has almost no impact on the driveability of the car, although other considerations that must be looked at and the initial cost of conversion is expensive. The intention is to show what considerations should be made if you are thinking about going down this route to see whether its appropriate for you.

Everyone has fond memories of their first car. My car was a 13 year old Citroen XM. The most amazing car that has ever been produced! An ‘executive’ size car, with a 2 litre turbo and Citroen’s amazing Hydractive suspension; pull a lever and the car ride height would actually rise and fall.

Affectionately nicknamed “Starship Enterprise” by my friends, you could almost mistake the looks for a cheap man’s de-lorean or an old Lotus Esprit. However this futuristic masterpiece under-lied a terrible secret. It was the most unreliable car ever to be produced by Citroen. And that says a lot, because Citroen is french for lemon. Countless times I would be told by the onboard computer that I hadn’t shut my door, my brake lights were broken or that I had to check the LHM levels. This last one was rather frightening because the LHM fluid is what kept the suspension, brakes and steering working. Above all else, I got less than 20 miles per gallon.
The short time I had this car showed me that I needed to consider practicalities when it came to cars, which is when I first heard about LPG.

What is LPG?
I’m sure google can answer this question better than me but what it meant for me is a lower cost fuel alternative for petrol cars. A petrol car can be modified to take LPG (Liquid Petrolium Gas) which is taxed much less than petrol or diesel. Its approximately half price for a litre of petrol.

At the end of last year I found myself driving 2 hours a day to work and back, so my weekly fuel costs were quite considerable. After some research, I decided to invest in a decent car, and have it converted to LPG.

I found a small garage near where I lived who specialised in LPG conversions. The owner was very friendly and explained to me the basic process of having a car converted, driving and using a car fitted with LPG and costs involved.

After consideration I finally bought a Mitsubishi Colt 2005 with a far more reasonable 1.3 litre standard petrol engine. I handed my car in to the garage for a couple of weeks and they fitted the new LPG system. I had a 60 Litre tank fitted but more on that later.

Getting used to the LPG system

When I came to pick up the car from the garage, There were three major noticeable differences. The first on the outside of the car there was a black and gold connector. This is the point where the gas is filled into the car. The second difference, inside the car, a new instrument indicator to show the status of the LPG system. Finally, in the boot, there was a huge tank fixed in place.
A new tank is required to store the different fuel. This is because LPG is a pressurised gas which must be kept air tight.

We drove to the nearest LPG fuel station to fill up. Upon starting the car, I had a to wait a minute running under petrol, before switching to LPG. This is because the LPG fuel must have perfect operating temperatures, a device called the Vaporizer must warm up before being able to use the fuel. As a result, LPG car conversions are actually duel fuel. They can run both petrol and LPG. This is handy if you run out of LPG and cant find an LPG station.

The filling up process is slightly different from a petrol or diesel car. You have to ‘lock’ in the nozzle to create an air-tight seal, then step back and press a button on the fuel pump to fill up. The fuel only comes out at a standard rate, unlike petrol where more comes out if you squeeze the trigger harder. When the tank is full, you hear a click and the flow automatically stops. This is convenient as it prevents overfilling the tank.

Driving the car has been identical to driving a car before it was converted. The engine sounds exactly the same, has the same power and handles the same. The only difference whilst driving is the indicator on the dashboard to show whether or not LPG is being used in place of petrol.
Petrol still must be used to start the engine each time its switched on, so you need to fill up once in a while, I think I used about 5 litres of petrol in a month. I noticed the LPG fuel indicator is not entirely accurate. It has 4 lights to indicate the amount of fuel left in the car but sometimes I’d start the car and there would be 1 light on (25%) and then it jumps to 2 lights (50%). Because there is only 4 lights, being out by 1 light is very inaccurate. The garage owner taught me the solution to this. Instead of using the gauge, always fill the tank to the maximum and then reset the trip counter on the dashboard. After a few journeys you can get a feel for how far you can drive on one full tank. In my case, I get about 410 miles in my usual every day driving. This has now become my gauge of my fuel, and its actually more accurate than the normal petrol gauge because I am usually accurate to about 5 miles. It is OK to run out of LPG whilst driving. If you do, the car automatically switches back to petrol seamlessly. In fact, the only way you do know is because the indicator on the dashboard beeps at you to tell you! Just don’t run out of petrol.

A Quick tip to save more on the petrol. When the car is started in the mornings, it can be driven straight away as usual, however it takes a minute or so for the LPG to kick in. I have found if I just keep the car parked during that time, I use much less petrol. It also warms the engine just slightly more before driving so should keep the engine in a better state as time goes on. When I fill up on petrol, I only put in about 5 litres, up to about ¼ of the tank. Petrol can go stale if it is not used for a long time so best not to have too much in there. But remember to keep enough such that if you run out of LPG, you can still drive to another fuel station, be that LPG or standard.

Not all petrol stations have LPG, so its important to plan ahead for which station to go to. For me, I discovered 2 stations between my work and home, so I used them. Beware that the prices between stations vary quite dramatically, as much as 10p per litre. This could quickly escalate in lost savings, especially for me considering I used more than 60 litres a week.

Ive had a couple of problems with the car since the installation, these have been a small gas leak outside the car (nothing to worry about, apparently..) and the LPG system stopped working at one point, it had to be repaired. Both times the garage took care of it under warranty and were very quick. The system was fitted by an authorised dealer and I am confident of the safety. There are certificates for the gas tank, installation, and a yearly check must be done on the gas system to ensure safety.

Was it a success?

The reason for my interest was to save money, so Ill break down the costs and savings.
The conversion kit cost was 1750 pounds, so to make things worthwhile I’d have to save that amount of money or more on fuel costs. The class of the car changed for road tax purposes, but that saves only 30 pounds per year.

Because fuel costs are so volatile its difficult to predict how things will go in the future. However, after getting the conversion the savings after were immediately visible at the fuel pump. One litre of LPG cost 57.9p, one litre of petrol was 112.9p. Its not quite as simple as that however, because the miles per gallon is slightly less with LPG. Instead of the 40 miles per gallon I got with petrol, I instead got 35 or so. However, considering the cost difference per litre, I worked out that per mile, LPG costs about 60% as much as petrol.
To put it another way, in order to make the same cost per mile, I would have to have a car which could do about 73 miles per gallon of petrol.

At those fuel prices, I calculated that it would take roughly 40,000 miles to break even on my initial investment. That would take me 2 years of driving to and from work 5 days a week. Considering the car already had 34,000 miles when I first got it, that would take it up to 74,000 which may then make it time to get a another car. So it would appear that I may just about have broken even if I continued to do those journeys for two years.

Overall I would see this experiment as an interesting one, albeit not quite a financial success in my case. It is true that savings are there to be made, but it is over a long period of time and there is the considerable investment cost at the start. In addition, I no longer have a boot! This isnt a problem for me, as I just put shopping and luggage on the back seats. However this may not be a solution for everyone. The gas tanks come in different sizes and depending on the size of the car, you can get an appropriately sized tank which gives you the range you need and leaving enough boot space. These are custom installations which can be fine tuned to your particular requirements.

To surmise, I would recommend doing the facts and figures on having an LPG conversion before taking the plunge. Usability-wise, there are only a few settling-in issues but they have been taken care of now. Actually driving the car itself is identical to driving before. I must admit it is a good feeling going to the station and filling up for half the price as the average driver.

In my personal situation, I needed to have a car with a long driving range, and didn’t need a boot, so thats why I chose a large tank in a small car. These sorts of decisions can be made per individuals personal circumstances.
I’ve heard from the garage owner that people with larger cars tend to go for LPG conversions more, as their miles per gallon is typically low, they make comparatively larger savings. Also, the performance is retained on the engine.

Driving LPG is certainly a viable alternative, and over time the advantages can be seen. And you can take pride that you are doing your little bit to save the environment Of course, the real savings come from not having to drive at all, but that if course is dependant on your own circumstances. For me, I don’t fancy cycling 100 miles a day, and public transport is more than twice the price and takes twice as long.

Create a DVD tutorial. Part 9

admin — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 20:17:49 +0000

This post begins from from here: Create a DVD tutorial in case you are lost.

In this post series I talk about mastering a DVD from various DVD sources.

In this final post I will show you how to burn the image created in previous steps. I will use a piece of software called BwgBurn to burn (Burn the DVD image to a final DVD-R) (http://bwgburn.sourceforge.net/)

The steps are very easy so I wont elaborate too much on this one.

Steps to Burn the image:

Insert a blank DVD-R into your DVD recorder
Click Burn Image icon
Select ISO file (Use the “..” button on the right hand side to locate the dvd.iso file created earlier)
Select Burn Disk. (Click the burn button. You will see text appear at the bottom and the progression bar increase. With any luck the DVD will complete and show you the completed message!)

Finished!

Thats it! Congratulations on your mastered DVD. You can now watch your work on a standard DVD player. There are lots and lots of customisation options to the various software parts. As you practise and become more skilled, you can make more professional looking work. As some companies have shown, you can sell this skill in recording a wedding or event, or save some serious money in doing it all yourself. Well done!

Create a DVD tutorial. Part 8

admin — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 18:57:57 +0000

This post begins from from here: Create a DVD tutorial in case you are lost.

In this post series I talk about mastering a DVD from various DVD sources.

In this post I will show you how to look at the DVD iso master file you created using DVD styler in the previous post

I will use WinRAR, a shareware file archiving application to extract the files to a folder, then use VLC media player to look at the DVD as if you had created a real DVD and put it into a real player. You can test the menus, videos and proof read any text before burning to CD.

If you find any corrections, go back and use DVD Styler to re-create the ISO file, as described in the previous post, including your corrections.

Steps to Check the DVD iso master file:

Use WinRAR to uncompress the DVD file to a folder on the desktop.
Open the DVD folder using VLC media player
Navigate the menus and play through the DVD

Step 1: Use WinRAR to uncompress the DVD file to a folder on the desktop.

After downloading and installing WinRAR (http://www.rarlab.com/), right click on the dvd iso file and select Open with → WinRAR application. This opens the WinRAR dialog as shown..

This is the contents of a standard DVD. Both folders should be extracted. Click on the “Extract to…” button at the top of the window. Be sure not to have any folders selected in the main window pane, that will extract only what is selected. Instead everything is needed.

Select a folder to extract to. I chose “DVD” on the desktop folder. Click OK to begin.

This stage took about 3 minutes for me, but it will depend on the speed of your computer and size of DVD image file.

Step 2: Open the DVD folder using VLC media player

Open VLC media player and click Media → open disk (or press CTRL + D)

In the disk open menu, select a DVD as a disk, then click on the Browse button. Navigate to the folder with your extract files in it. Previously I extracted my files to “DVD” on the desktop, so I selected that folder and the path was populated.

Open media dialog, with disc device path selected

Finally, click Play to load the DVD.

Step 3: Navigate the menus and play through the DVD

You should now see the DVD main menu. Use the standard play controls to navigate through the DVD. Use the mouse to click on the menu options. Note down any mistakes and go back to DVD styler if you need to make corrections and repeat the process.

Once you are satisfied with the final DVD image, its time to move on to the final step and burn it to a recordable DVD.

Create a DVD Tutorial. Part 7

admin — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 20:28:44 +0000

This post begins from from here: Create a DVD tutorial in case you are lost.

In this post series I talk about mastering a DVD from various DVD sources.

This is a continuation post using DVD Styler, an application to build a DVD image file with menus and videos. This software creates a DVD file (.iso file) which can then be burned to disk, or viewed on the computer. The first part of using this software is here at part

Step 6: Add Text Object

You can also add in new object into menus. Right click and go to add to see a range of objects that can be added. In this case a url is to be added, so click Text.

The right click menu on a menu, adding a piece of text

You can then type in the text to appear, and voila! A new text object has appeared in the menu. This can be moved or changed as before in step 5 in the previous post.

Step 7: Add Image Object

Just like text, a picture can be added into a menu using the same right-click menu. Right click on a space, go to Add, then Image. You can then search on your computer for an appropriate photo file.

Right click menu, adding an Image to the menu

After adding the picture in, I had to resize it by dragging at the corners of the picture to get the right size, and dragging to the correct position on the menu.

First menu page, showing Amanda’s picture, with URL link added in.

Step 8: Add Information menu page

Extra menus can be added for greater depth into the DVD menu system. Examples of use of this might be for a language selection screen, for a credits page or for extra text information about a movie. It is possible to create a new menu screen from scratch, but because menu settings have already been set in other menus, lets make a copy of an existing one and make changes to it. Go to the bottom pane and click on menu2. Then Right click and click Copy. Now go to a space between menu 2 and Title 1. Right click and then select Paste. This should copy the first menu to a new “menu 3″ Use the object editing tools mentioned before. The link buttons picture and text can be removed. New text can be added in to give the new page. Be sure to leave the back button so the user can get back to the main menu.

A new menu, called menu 3. This will be used as an information board.

Text and images can be added to the menu3 to populate it as needed.

This menu must be linked to the first menu in order for the user to find it. Buttons can be added from the Button selection panel on the far left if you want to experiment with different styles but to keep things simple, lets just copy another link on the menu1. Make a duplicate link by copying one menu, and pasting it back into the menu page. Use the right click actions on the screen to do this. The new link can be re-labeled appropriately (I named mine “information”) and moved to the correct place.

We must now change the destination of this button. Right click on the new button and go to properties. The button properties menu should appear as shown here.

Showing properties dialog for a button.

Using the “jump to” drop down, change to menu 3; the new menu created earlier. This drop down menu represents every menu and video in the DVD image. This means that when this button is pressed, it will go to the selected video or menu.

By using these steps you can create as many menu pages as you like, and have them link in intricate ways to build up a system in any way you want.

Step 9: ‘Burn’ the DVD image

By now you should have a pretty complete DVD layout, consisting of menus, button links and videos. This should now be ready to put on to a DVD! Remember to save your work so far.

This software is capable of burning to a DVD, but I found the burn failed every time I tried. To solve this, I ‘burned’ the DVD to a single image file (an .iso file) which I would then use later on to check on the computer, or burn with another piece of software.

To create the DVD image, click the burn DVD icon (Red burning disc at the top of the main window) or click DVD -> burn DVD, or press F9. This will bring up the Burn DVD dialog as shown here

Burning DVD dialog.

Ensure the temp directory is set (I set mine to c:\temp, you dont really need to worry about where this is as you wont need to look at these files, but they get quite big so its useful to know where to delete them later on) Click “Create iso image” and select a place to save the iso file to. I put my file on the desktop for easy access. Now click Start to begin the burn.

The generate DVD screen. This sits here for at least 30 mins

You will now see the DVD generation dialog. And it will sit there for at least 30 minutes. Unfortunately it will take this long to create the DVD image as there is a lot of re-compression of the videos to do. If you plan on doing this frequently for the same videos, I advise keeping the temporary files folder the same each time, and do not delete the temporary files. That should at least save the time of re-compressing the video files.

After some time you should find the completed DVD message:

A successful DVD build

In Green letters it will say “Generating was successful”

Check on your destination folder specified before (the desktop in my case) for the new .iso file. This is the image file for a DVD to be burned.

The next step will be to review the DVD image on the computer, to ensure all the work done is fine and to allow for any fixes to be done if necessary.

In the next post I will use WinRar to de-compress the .iso file to the hard-drive, so I can watch the DVD on the computer using VLC player.

Create a DVD Tutorial. Part 6

admin — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 19:04:14 +0000

This post begins from from here: Create a DVD tutorial in case you are lost.

In this post series I talk about mastering a DVD from various DVD sources.

In this post I take you through using DVD Styler, an application to build a DVD image file with menus and videos. This software creates a DVD file (.iso file) which can then be burned to disk, or viewed on the computer.

DVDStyler (http://www.dvdstyler.de/) is a DVD authoring application. Now I had my 3 videos in AVI format, cropped and faded (from the previous step) the next step is to compile the DVD image using these videos. DVD Styler is a great piece of software which creates DVDs which are usable in standard DVD players.

Using this software I ordered the videos how I wanted, and added a customised DVD menu system to select the Videos on the DVD, as well as an ‘info’ page.

There is lots more to this software than what is in this tutorial, but there should be enough here to get a feel for the program and do the basics. I’ve split this part of the tutorial into 2 posts because there was so many pictures.

Steps to author the DVD image:

Start Application and Create a new project with Wizard
Add videos
Customise menu settings and background
Edit, Move and Delete Objects in the menu pages
Change Text
Add Text Object
Add Image Object
Add Information menu page
‘Burn’ the DVD image

Step 1: Start Application and Create a new project with Wizard

Downloading, installing and running the application was an easy process. When you run, you will be presented with this screen.

DVD Styler startup screen

A welcome wizard window pops up at the start, allowing you to create a new project or load a previously created one. To create a new project, type in the basic details and click OK. Basic details are:

disc label (this will be visible on the final DVD if you put it into a PC)
capacity (4.7gb for the most common single layer recordable DVDs)
video quality (I just left this on Auto)
Video format (PAL for UK, NTSC for US)
Aspect ratio (I chose standard 4:3 as my source videos are this ratio)
Audio format (I just left it has AC3 48Khz)

After clicking OK, a new window pops up asking for a default template to use. Enter a title and select “blue” as shown in the next picture.

Template selection menu for DVD menus

Click OK to complete the wizard and progress to the main window.

DVDStyler main window

This is the main screen. The bottom pane shows the menus and videos in this DVD session. The left pane shows default buttons and backgrounds that can be chosen. The right pane shows a larger version of the selected menu from the bottom.

Step 2: Add videos

Now its time to add the videos created in the previous step for this tutorial.

Picture showing right click on bottom pane to add in a video.

Right click in a space to the right of “menu 2″, click Add, then File… Next, find and select a video file you created earlier. You can only do this one at a time, so repeat this step for all the videos.

Loading a video takes some time. For me it took about 2 minutes to load in each video. This depends on the size of the file loaded and speed of the computer. Theres no indication of whats happenening so please just be patient.

For each video loaded, settings are required. Click the video button at the bottom to get a 2^nd properties page, as shown in the next picture

Properties windows for a new video

Make sure the Format and Aspect ratio match your initial settings. Nothing else needs changing. Click OK on both property windows and the video will appear at the bottom.

After loading all your videos, your screen should look like this:

All 3 videos added and visible on the bottom pane, and in the menu 2 scene selector

Menu 2 (click on it on the bottom pane if its not shown on the right) shows small pictures of each video. This is the scene selection menu. Usually on a DVD, you can play the whole thing at once, or select chapters or scenes using a menu like this.

Save your project here so you can come back to it later. Remember the old Control S rule. Save frequently in case anything bad happens, so you don’t lose too much work.

Step 3: Customise menu settings and background

At this point you can change the background for menus. Each menu screen in the DVD has to be set individually so you have to do it for each menu. Starting with menu 1, right click on it on the bottom pane, then click Properties.

Properties windows for menus. Here you can change the background picture

Ensure the format is set correctly. In my case again, PAL with 4:3 aspect ratio. To change the background, Click the browser button (“…” button) next to Image near the top of the window. You can then choose a different image file for the background using the defaults in the folder, or select your own picture. I ended up choosing a turquoise background picture to replace the blue background.

Click on the Video button at the bottom to bring up the 2^nd set of properties. Ensure the aspect ratio is set (in my case 4:3) and click OK to both properties windows.

Repeat this for menu 2.

The right pane shows menu 2, with new turquoise background

As you can see, the menu 2 on the right pane shows the new background. For me, the icons on the bottom pane didn’t seem to update properly, but so long as the larger right pane is correct, that is fine. The icons at the bottom are just thumbnails which presumably didn’t update.

Step 4: Edit, Move and Delete Objects in the menu pages

The menu pages consist of a background and basic elements such as text, images and buttons. These can be manipulated easily by using the mouse and property options of each object. Lets take the menu 2 for example.

picture showing a selected object to be deleted.

In this menu, there is space for 4 video selections and arrows at the bottom to skip between different scene selection menus if you have more than 4 selections to make. In my case, I have only 3 videos so the arrows and one video slot is not necessary.

To delete an object in the menu, click on in with the left mouse button. You will see a red outline around the selection object. Then right click and select delete (as shown on the previous picture)

The remaining objects can then be dragged about the screen using the mouse to make it more presentable.

Only 3 scene selections now on the menu, and moved about to look better.

Because I only needed 3 scene options to choose, I rearranged them to look more appropriate.

Step 5: Change Text Object

In menu 1, I wanted to have Amanda’s name for the title. The template already created some text for the disc title, it says “Disc Title.” How original.

Getting options up for “Disc Title” text box so it can be changed

To change the text, select it, then right click and go to properties as shown in the previous picture.

This will bring up the next properties menu for the text object.

Properties for the text object.

In this properties box, you can change the text displayed, as well as the font, colour and size. I found this to be an iterative process, continually changing, clicking OK, seeing how it was on screen, then going back in to make small changes to get it just right.

Check the next post for the next part in this stage of the tutorial to use DVDStyler.

Create a DVD Tutorial. Part 5

admin — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 23:15:36 +0000

This post begins from from here: Create a DVD tutorial in case you are lost.

In this post series I talk about mastering a DVD from various DVD sources.

In this post I take you through using Virtual Dub, a free video editing package, to crop the video, add fade effects and save out your new video.

Step 4 Virtual Dub (Trim the videos and apply simple video editing)

Here’s where things get interesting. In this step you will get to edit your video using this powerful software. It is quite complex software and there is lots and lots of functions waiting for you. I’d highly advise spending some time playing with this package and explore the features. This guide gives some very basic loading and saving instructions, along with cropping and adding a blended fade to/from black effect. Hopefully this will get you started on your adventure of creating your perfect masterpiece!

Ill break this tutorial down to smaller steps as there is quite a lot to do

Open the application (harder than it sounds)
Open a video
Set a Selection and Crop the video
Add a fade to / from black effect
Set video compression type
Save the edited file

Step 1: Open the application.

Firstly, Download and install VirtualDub from http://www.virtualdub.org/. I found that this package installed the files to the hard drive, but never installed a short cut to the start menu. If you can’t find VirtualDub in the start menu, you’ll have to find the VirtualDub.exe file in the installed folder. To do this, use windows explorer (Press Windows Key + E, or click on the “Computer” Icon on the start menu (“My Computer” for Windows XP). Navigate to the installation directory (Something Like C:\Program files (x86)\Virtual Dub. (Remove the x86 for 32 bit versions of windows) VirtualDub.exe should be in that folder. In my case, I installed the software to C:\DVDEDITING so I could find it easily from the C:\ root folder.

When you open the application, you will be presented with an empty window, with a horizontal scroll bar at the bottom with buttons. This is your default view with the play bar to show your progress through a playing video.

Step 1: locate the VirtualDub.exe application file in your computer if necessary

Step 1: VirtualDub applciation newly opened

Step 2: Open a Video.

Step 2: An opened video showing 2 video screens and horizontal scroll bar at the bottom

Go to File then click Open Video. Then navigate to your AVI videos you created in the previous step You can have one video open at a time. So in my case, I had to do all my editing to one file before saving, and opening the next one.

When you open a video, you will see 2 video boxes appear. These are the pre-edit (left) and post-edit (right) boxes. They show the video before any editing has been done and what the final effect will be. For justnow they will be exactly the same as no editing has been done yet, but you will see the differences after doing the black fade effects later on.

These can be re-sized by clicking on the corner of each frame and dragging to any size or ratio. These boxes are for your own reference and the ratios and sizes on screen have no effect on the final file output.

Have a go at dragging the horizontal scroll bar to navigate through the length of the video. The numbers mark the frame numbers of the video, and you can play/stop using the buttons at the bottom (stop and play are at the bottom left)

Step 3: Set a selection and crop the video.

Amanda sang only for a section of the video so I had to crop out another singer in the video. To do this I marked the video by dropping start and end points, Then I cropped the selection to leave only what I selected.

Step 3 – Making a selection: Set a start point

To drop the Start point, select where you want to begin the crop using the horizontal scroll bar. For extra precision, I used play and stop to get to the exact moment. Click Edit, Set selection start to drop the start point. Alternatively press the HOME button on the keyboard. Moving the Position on the video will reveal the dropped point (black triangle and thin line as shown in the screen shot above) Leave an extra second of video if you can. This will be useful to overlay the fade in effect in the next step.

Step 3 – Making a selection: Set an end point

To drop the End point, select where you want to end using the horizontal scroll bar. In my case, the end point was the end of the video. Click Edit, Set selection end to drop the end point. Or press the END button on the keyboard. As you can see in the screen shot, this will show a bright bar across the horizontal scroll bar. This is your selection.

Step 3 – Crop the selection

Finally to Crop, click Edit, crop to selection. Notice the before and after in the screen shots. The Bright selection bar has dissappeared and the frame numbers across the horizontal scroll bar have decreased. This was our previous selection of video. The rest has been discarded, keeping the part you want.

Well done! Selecting parts of the video is an important step for copying, cutting, pasting and otherwise editing your videos. With these tools you can change the order of videos, trim(crop) and splice in different videos to make a combined video.

Step 4. Fade To / From Black.

After I cropped the video in the previous step, I saw that the video began abruptly with the scene and Amanda was about to sing. When playing this as a DVD track, this would look disjointed, especially if it was playing on from a previous track. What was needed was a Fade in to ease the transition. This means starting with a totally black picture, and blending in the video over a short time (1-2 seconds)

First, use the horizontal scroll bar at the bottom of the window to go to where you want the fade to happen. In my case, I wanted a fade in from the beginning so I went to the very start of the video. If I wanted it at the end, I’d scroll to about 2 seconds from the end of the video.

Step 4 – Fade to/from black: Add the brightness filter

Step 4 – Fade to/from black: Set the [B] to blend

Next add a brightness/contrast filter to your video. To do this, bring up the video filters dialogue box by clicking on Video, Filters (or pressing CTRL+F). Click on the “Add…” button and select “brightness/contrast” in the next dialogue box. Click OK and you will then be asked about details for this filter. Select Brightness to full Black (move the top slider to the far left) and click OK. This means a filter will be applied throughout the whole video making it completely black. However only a small section of the video needs this, so a blend is needed. Click on the “Blend” button at the bottom right. The brightness/contrast Filter entry on the window should now have a [B] shown next to the tick box on the left. This shows that this filter will be Blended.

Step 4 – Fade to/from black: Showing the curve editor on screen

Now the filter is added, it needs to be blended correctly. Pull up the curve window by clicking View, Curve Editor. On the main window a new panel will be shown above the horizontal scroll bar at the bottom. Resize the two video windows if they cover it up.

The red line in the centre represents the currently selected frame using the horizontal scroll bar. You may notice the frame numbers on the Curve Editor window aren’t the same as horizontal scroll bar. In my case (on the picture) I’m at frame 0, the very start of the video at the bottom, but on the curve editor I’m between frames 11060 and 11065. This is because this is the original frame numbers, before I started cropping earlier. This isn’t a problem, just be aware of it.

Step 4 – Fade to/from black: Points on the curve

The next step is to add points into the curve. The curve represents the strength of the filter throughout time. I want a starting fade from black. This means I want to start at 100% strength (completely black) and then gradually lessen the strength so it ends at 0% strength (back to normal video) and keep it that way for the rest of the video. I need 2 points in the curve; a start point and end point. Move the mouse to the red vertical line, hold the left shift button (the mouse pointer icon should change to a mouse with a + icon next to it) then click the left mouse button. Next, move the mouse along about 20 frames worth to the right and drop another point. This will now show a horizontal line connecting both points and the sides of the screen. The line indicates the strength of the filter during the whole video, it just stays the same either side of the points.

The points can be moved about by hovering over them and dragging with the mouse. Make sure the Left point is as high as it will go at the start point of the video (where the red line is). Then ensure the right point is as low as possible 20 frames or so to the right. This provides the blend from black to normal video across those blends.

Step 4 – Fade to/from black: Looking at the output through time. The right video is darker

To see the result, move the horizontal scroll bar position through the start of the video and look at the video screens. The left video should always be the same, but the right one will be different brightness at different frames. You can also see it in action by pressing the play button. You can also use the mouse wheel to scroll, this gives much better precision between frames.

For a video that needs a fade to black at the end, just make sure the markers are at the right place (i.e. at the end) and begins at the bottom, then moves up to the top to make it black

Step 5. Set video compression type

Step 5 – Select the video compression…

The next stage is to specify the output format. This is important because a compressed format is required to have reasonable file sizes. When I first saved, I used uncompressed avi. The output file size for a 15 minute video was over 20 Gigabytes, bigger than a DVD’s size. It might be possible to save a file that size, but I found problems loading it back in again with software later on, so I had to return to this stage to save it as a smaller file.

Bring up the Video Compression dialogue box by clicking on Video, Compression, or press CTRL + P. On the dialogue box, click on “Xvid MPEG-4 Codec” Next click on configure to bring up the controls for this particular selection. There are loads of controls, but for justnow just move the slider control to the far left for “1 (maximum quality)” Click OK on both windows to close.

Step 5 – Options for video compression

There are loads of settings for types of compression, and quality controls within each one. These result in different file sizes and different quality of video. Generally speaking, the lower the quality, the small the file size. For something like a youtube video, you might get away with a low quality because file size is important. For a DVD however, it would need quality. Take the time to find out what quality and settings are good for your purpose.

Step 6. Saving the file

With your new video edits and compression type entered, all thats needed now is to save your work. Click on File, Save as AVI… or press F7 to save your file in the usual way. Save this as a meaningful file name because this will be the file that will be used to build your DVD image. I called mine “Amanda track 1 FINAL.avi”

This is a complex piece of software and it takes a fair amount of work to get the effects you want but there are lots of cool effects to choose from and with enough practise you can master using the program to do exactly what you want. You’ve done well to get this far!

Create a DVD Tutorial. Part 4

admin — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 20:32:29 +0000

This post begins from from here: Create a DVD tutorial in case you are lost.

In this post series I talk about mastering a DVD from various DVD sources.

This post talks about taking the ripped DVD files (VOB files, created in the previous step) and converting them to .AVI format for use in the video editor in the next step

Step 3. ConvertVobToAvi (Convert the DVD files to more usable file formats)

This software (http://www.convertvobtoavi.com/) does exactly as the name says. The file format created using DVD Decrypter in the previous step created a .VOB file. This needs to be converted to .AVI file to be read in the editing application (next step)

After downloading, installing and loading the application, click open in the “Source VOB File” section (at the top of the window) and locate the VOB file that you created earlier for your DVD track.

Next select the output format and ratio size. Select XVID and 4:3 for just now. Notice you could also make different formats (even for PSP) and widescreen (16:9) if you feel like experimenting.

Click Convert. You will then be asked for the destination folder. I put this in C:\TEMP but you can put it on your desktop folder so you dont lose it. After selecting the folder the conversion will begin.

You can see the progression of the file as shown on the bottom screen shot, but I found that it took 3-4 minutes longer after the progression bar had reached the top before the SAVING SUCCESS message popped up.

I did this with all 3 VOB files (the DVD tracks I ripped earlier) to produce 3 AVI files.

My source video was 4:3 and I used XVID because I know its an open-source codec. I would recommend using these as defaults but if your source DVD is widescreen or a different ratio, then you can change to suit.

Create a DVD Tutorial. Part 3

admin — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 15:24:54 +0000

This post begins from from here: Create a DVD tutorial in case you are lost.

In this post series I talk about mastering a DVD from various DVD sources.

This post talks about using DVD Decryper to rip a DVD’s tracks to the computer.

Step 2 Using DVD Decrypter to rip the tracks.

If you haven’t done so already, download DVD Decrypter (http://www.dvddecrypter.org.uk/) Even though it says that development has stopped, the download file is still available.

To get the selected DVD tracks on to the hard drive, I used this software on each DVD. When I loaded in a DVD, it listed the tracks at the right of the screen with tick boxes to select which tracks and chapters you wanted to copy. A track contains many chapters and its impossible to see how long each chapter is using this software. It is possible to rip by chapter, but because I didnt know which ones to tick, I just selected them all from one track.

The next step is to choose the destination folder. This is shown on the left part of the window (see the picture) and there is a small folder icon to select a folder to save to. In this case I just put it to C:\Temp folder.

The next step is to click the big DVD/Hard drive icon at the bottom left. This starts the program with the settings given. The bottom snapshot shows what the window now looks like. It rips the selected DVD tracks to file. This process takes a few minutes, and at the end you will have files in the C:\Temp folder. These are the ripped dvd videos.

There are lots of settings to be played about with in this program but I found just doing the simple actions of choosing what to rip, where to put it and click to start was all the options I needed for this purpose. If you feel adventureous you could have a look in all the menus and see what tweaks can be done.

Create a DVD Tutorial. Part 2

admin — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 14:48:36 +0000

This post begins from from here: Create a DVD tutorial in case you are lost.

In this post series I talk about mastering a DVD from various DVD sources.

This post talks about using VLC to view a DVD.

Step 1. Find what to rip

Amanda and I watched all 3 DVDs to find out what tracks she wanted to have in her own DVD. The following selections were made:

DVD 1, track 2

DVD 2, track 2 from start till 09:21

DVD 3, track 2 from 8:00 until the end.

I used software called VLC to view the DVD on the computer and see what I needed to get. VLC is a freeware media player for Windows and Linux (http://www.videolan.org/vlc/) I’d highly recommend using this as a default media player for anything, as it can handle just about any media file. It also changes the screen ratio size, can do subtitles, multi audio tracks and loads of other things. I prefer this one to others in that its a very small and quick player (much much quicker and smaller than Microsoft’s Windows Media Player) To play a dvd, click media->open disk and select the DVD drive. This will play the menu of the DVD and you can select the options, or use track skip to select the DVD scenes.

The standard play, track change and volume controls are available at the bottom of the window. The time elapsed is also available to find the times to start the video from. I use this as my standard media player, not just for looking at DVDs. Its features, effeciency, compatibility and ease of use is hard to beat.

In the next part I will talk about step 2, ripping the selected tracks to the computer using DVD Decrypter

DVDtutorial 01 VLC

Create a DVD Tutorial. Part 1

admin — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 06:39:26 +0000

This is a tutorial post about how to create a video DVD on your computer to play in a standard DVD player. I use only free software or shareware, on Windows. There are a lot of steps, but its easy enough to do and I have provided links to all the software I used. In future posts I will also provide step-by-step guides on the usage of each piece of software to get the job done. You dont need to have a degree in computing to do this; if you can log on to a website and read this text, you can help out a friend and create their wedding DVD, without being charged hundreds of pounds for a company to do exactly the same work.

2 years ago my girlfriend Amanda asked me to help her make a DVD of her opera singing. She had 3 DVDs of her in various concerts but she wanted to have one single DVD of just her. This would be her DVD that she can copy and send out to other people as a CV.

I finally got round to doing it a few weeks ago and I’d like to share what I did. I used all free software and shareware. I admit that I am technologically aware (read: geek) but ripping, mastering and burning DVDs was not part of my repertoire so this required some learning to be able to achieve this. If this is something you would like to do, keep reading! It doesn’t matter if you don’t yet know how to do these things or don’t have the right software. If you can read this page right now, and download a podcast (or any other file) to the desktop, you can make a DVD. I’ll provide step by step instructions on how to do it, and all the software you need.

Last summer I attended a wedding of a close friend and he mentioned later on that he was charged a rather obscene amount for someone to video the wedding and create DVDs of the day. The sorts of skills involved in recording and DVD-mastering aren’t impossible to learn (as I found out) it just takes time to learn how to do all the processes. And it considering it can be done on standard PC hardware, its really a no brainer to spend the time learning and doing, its easy, accessible and costs a lot less. The skills you learn can be easily applied again and again. Maybe you could offer to record a friend’s wedding or recital and make distributable DVDs for them.

There are commercial software packages such as Sony Vegas that presumably do everything I needed in one package, but the software costs between £25 – £350 depending on the edition. Besides, I looked upon this as a challenge to get dirty with file formats and converting video streams and hopefully learn a little bit about creating DVDs. I wanted find out exactly what was happening in my computer, down to the files used and what processes were occurring. It turns out that it isn’t really that complex, but it just takes time to discover what you need for each process.

The DVDs I used as input contained no copyright protection, and Amanda holds the copyrights to her own singing. The purpose of these DVDs is to promote Amanda as a professional singer and they would not be sold for any money. With that in mind, I didn’t deal with any copyrighted or copy-protected video so I didn’t use any bypassing of copy-protection. The end DVD was about 30 minutes in length.

This is going to be quite a long post, so Ill break it down to different entries. Think of this one as the overview. Ill go into the specific steps for each program later on.

I’ve mentioned a few applications, they may not be the latest versions, but for me they were light-weight, reasonably easy to use and didn’t cost me a penny. This should allow you to give this a shot without any financial investment. Who knows, you might even enjoy it! At least, you will get a feel for the different applications which you might like. For example, I now use VLC media player and WinRAR as my default applications instead of Windows Media Player or WinZip now. To me they are far faster and have greater functionality. Have fun!

Materials:

Amanda gave me the following source material:

3 standard DVDs containing her singing (about 10 minutes out of 50 minutes in each DVD)

Link to her website with pictures and CV.

Required Output:

The requested goal was to have a final DVD, playable in standard DVD players, using only clips of her from the other DVDs. There should be a scene selector to choose between scenes just like a standard DVD. Finally, if possible, have information pages containing her CV in text and showing a link to her website.

Tools:

These are the software packages in the order that I used. They are all free (with the exception of WinRAR which is a shareware version) and I’ve provided links to download for each one. Most of these I found on source forge website (http://sourceforge.net/) which lists loads of open source applications.

VLC. (Review the content) (http://www.videolan.org/vlc/)
This free media player plays most major formats, including playing from DVD as well as files on the computer. I used this to review the content on the source DVDs to get the track numbers and times within tracks to use.
DVD Decrypter (Rip the Required DVD content to computer) (http://www.dvddecrypter.org.uk/)
This software rips the DVD, track at a time, to files on the computer. Using the times and tracks information I collected in the previous step, I copied full tracks on to the computer.
ConvertVobToAvi.com (Convert the DVD files to more usable file formats) (http://www.convertvobtoavi.com/)
The DVD files needed to be converted to a different format so they could be modified using a video editor package. This package took in the DVD file and coverted to a file format suitable for editing by the next package..
VirtualDub (Trim the videos and apply simple video editing) (http://www.virtualdub.org/)
I used this package to trim the videos where required, and add fade to black and fade from black effects.
DVDStyler (Create the DVD structure menus and order the videos) (http://www.dvdstyler.de/)
This software was used to create the final DVD master. The final content was saved as a DVD image file so it could be burned to DVD later. In this I arranged the videos in sequence and created a simple DVD menu system to navigate. This software created the final DVD image in .iso format.
WinRAR (Test the DVD image on computer) (http://www.rarlab.com/)
The DVD image file could be read within the computer as a DVD. I used this software to extract the single iso file to its DVD files which I sent to the desktop. I then used VLC again to play the files as if it was a DVD. This saved the time of having to burn first.
BwgBurn (Burn the DVD image to a final DVD-R) (http://bwgburn.sourceforge.net/)
The final stage was to burn the DVD image file to an actual DVD. This could then be played or tested on a real DVD player.

I have Windows Vista on an Intel Quad Core Desktop computer with 2GB of memory and 500Gb free hard drive space. All the software runs on Windows Vista and should be fine with Windows XP and Windows 7. I believe you could get most of the software for Linux as well (if you couldn’t get the exact same applications, there will be equivalent ones available)

It is technically possible to master the DVD image on a netbook with no internal DVD drive (by obtaining the source videos from the internet or from a USB stick) but I wouldnt advise it as the CPUs in netbooks are generally quite slow, it would take much longer to do all the steps. In my opinion netbooks are great for typing and surfing on the move, but thats about it.

There are quite a few stages and complexities to someone who doesn’t know much about video editing. If things like folders, files, video streams, AVIs, MP3s and XVID scare you, then keep reading. This tutorial has been written exactly for you!

The total process time for me took about 2 hours, including the time waited for the computer to actually do the work as well as downloading and installing the software itself. Remember, I started off not knowing how to do most of the things I will mention in this tutorial.

The best way to learn is to experiment with all the different parts. I know however that it can be quite daunting, especially if theres loads of different buttons and don’t seem to have any intuitive process to use them. The next blog entries will include step by step instructions on what I did for each step I mentioned earlier. Why not begin by getting the software and having a play about with it yourself?