Converting 3GP video clips for use in PD20?

meerkat

Newbie Joined: Oct 12, 2022 12:17 Messages: 14 Offline

Solved by

Dec 14, 2022 17:21

I'm planning to use PD20 (lifetime license, not 365) to create a blu-ray containing about a dozen videos from my grandchild's first couple of years. All of them are MP4s except for two that were shot on a phone in .3GP format. Those two clips look absolutely HORRENDOUS when viewed on a computer - noisy, grainy, blurry - and so I assume they would look equally awful on a tv screen.

So I checked the supported file formats in PD20 itself, and it does include 3GPP2 as one of them. However, this is what MediaInfo says about the two video clips that I have:

MPEG-4 (3GPP Media Release 5), 325 kiB, 30 sec 427 ms
1 video stream: H.263
1 audio stream: AMR
First video stream: 79.9 kb/s, 176*144 (4.3) at 10,000 FPS, H.263

It looks to me as if PD20 cannot use these files because they are only 3GPP / H.263 rather than 3GPP2 / H.264. Is that correct? (If so, very disappointing because these are two of her 'first words' video clips.)

Again looking at my PD20 user guide, it only mentions MPEG4 as MPEG-4 AVC (H.264). Does that mean that PD20 does not support H.263 video files at all?

It seems illogical that there wouldn't be a way to upconvert H.263 to H.264, especially as there must be scads of H.263 video clips around from "back in the day", lol

Thanks for any advice!

optodata

Senior Contributor Location: California, USA Joined: Sep 16, 2011 16:04 Messages: 8630 Offline

Dec 14, 2022 18:53

The easiest way to check whether those clips will work with PD20 is to simply try to import them. If it can't, there are many free apps that will let you convert the clips into a more modern format, like Handbrake or VLC or VirtualDub2.

Sadly, the MediaInfo specs also tell you everything you already know - the clips are tiny and have a very low video bitrate so there's very little visual content in them for PD to work with even after they've been converted.

You might have some luck with an video upscaler like Video AI from Topaz Labs, as that usees artificial intelligence modeling to smooth over the missing content and create high quality content when expanding the tiny pixel size (176x144) by 4x or more.