I need a program that will look at the avi file and tell me what the field order is. I'm tired of screwing up media because of the wrong selection in my encoder. Also, how come a file that works perfect with CCE setting of Upper Field first, must be set to Lower Field first in TMPGEnc (latest version)? Which program is backwards? CCE or TMPGEnc?

I am new to this message board so I haven't gone back into the previous threads very far (yet). My recent experience, however, is that CCE gets field order backwards. I am dealing with DV, and every program I touch advises "lower field first," but as a test I did an encode with CCE with both lower and upper. Surprise--the "lower" encode showed the shakes on an NTSC set, while the "upper" came out fine. I think CCE has them mixed up.

Thanks for the replys. I have it worked out here now though. I have Ulead Video Studio 6, and Ulead DVD Workshop. I find that if I load the AVI into either of those programs, and click on file properties it tells the field order. There's got to be a simple (small) utility out there somewhere that will read/report the file properties though. Now, does anyone know how to get Vdub to output to MS DV Format avi's? I want to use the Vdub filters to clean up movies before converting to MPG2, but all the other CODEC's produce files that are too large. A typical DV Format (MS) avi file is about 30GB for 2 hrs. Using other CODEC's the file is about 500GB (I can't live with that, I only have 160 GB to work with).