hi guys, i just have a couple questions for you...

let me explain my predicament. for my kaleidescope patch, i use [pix_write] to dump a jpeg every rendering frame, as well as recording a stereo .wav at the same time. from there, i use ffmpeg to string the jpegs into an avi, lame to convert the .wav into an mp3, and then mencoder to combine the .avi and .mp3 into the final movie. i haven't gotten pdp up and running yet, so i can't dump straight to a movie, but i'm fine with that for the time being. it is a pain when i have a lot of audio objects going at once, because then it starts to skip and stutter while rendering (kind of defeats the purpose of "realtime".) so my first question is, if i increase the latency in Pd, which should theoretically kill the stuttering during rendering (from my understanding reading one of ClaudiusMaximus' posts), will the audio and video files still line up right? i trigger them both to record at the same time, and usually the audio has a fraction of a second of dead air in the beginning, but will increasing the latency cause any significant sync issues between the files? this isn't a huge deal, since i can just always go in and edit the sound file to fix the sync (which i usually have to do because of that little silent bit at the beginning).

but anyways, onto my real question. i want to use [shell] to execute all the steps necessary above to create the final video, and have it all in one patch that can recieve the info from other patches (such as file locations, mainly) so as to do it automatically. if i send shell a series of commands, will it properly execute them one at a time, starting the next after finishing the first (like a bash script, for instance)? i only ask because i don't currently have access to my linux machine to test this... it would be real nice to have all the steps executed simply by hitting a bang after recording, but i don't know [shell] well enough yet to know how to properly do this.

any advice/suggestions are welcome. sorry for the long-winded post, but i'm just being thorough! also, when i get my machine back, i'll post the exact commands i use to make the videos. thanks guys!

-ian

Yup, [shell] is just what you think it is, it passes to bash (or your shell) whatever you supply and executes in order as it would at the command line.

In theory you shouldn't have any alignment problems because two streams are getting written at different rates. The files are "real-time-independent" so everything that gets written will line up so long as there are no actual buffer dropouts in the data.

Practically speaking, I haven't tried this. I'm wondering whether for best results you should only work in video and audio while composing your sound and graphics, but actually do your "mastering" as two separate passes. Any thoughts?