It��s not my intention to always use some industrial strengthen application to do something simple and trivial (at least form my standpoint), but it��s just that I cannot find tools that does what a want, and those powerful professional applications always have the final grain control to allow me to do exactly what I need.

Case in point: today I need to, yet again, adjust the volume of a VCD (MPEG 1) video by normalizing it as the original volume is too low for me to use it during my dance practice. The trick is that the volume-normalized video will eventually feed to the Sony Clie movie converter to concert the video to a particular MPEG 4 format so that I can view it on my Sony Clie.

I don��t know of any utility that can adjust MPEG 1 audio directly, so I tried to use Vega 3, and later Vega 5.0b. They both generated videos that looked OK on Windows Media Player, but when I put those videos in the Sony Clie movie converter, they all converted into some videos that have a lot of noise.

After a few attempts, I was frustrated, and decided to use the pro app Adobe Premiere Pro. I set the movie to the VCD PAL size and frame rate, and it created a video that Sony Clie converter can consume. So far so good. But now they Sony Clie converter failed to convert the whole video because the source video file is too huge (2G). So I have to lower to file size by using the sucky Video1 compression in order to lower to file size to about 1G (Sony converter seems to have problem with size bigger than one gig.

So once again, simple problem, complex solution.