My 3D Studio Max 6 study reach to a point where instead of going thru a few sections of a chapter a day (or, at the beginning, more than a chapter a day), to which I can only finish one segment a day. The concepts are getting harder to grab and require more time to practice. This is good, that means I start to reach to the advance materials that I never get into before.

For a long while I was using VCDCutter to extract video from VCD (MPEG 1) . But today I tried TMPGEnc, and it��s equal capable to do the same job. Best of all, it��s a free app (well, at least for the MPEG1 editing capability). This is one app definitely worth trying out.

I also used TMPGEnc to enhance the audio of a VCD movie, and it��s pretty straight forward. This is how it works.

- Load TMPGEng, go to menu [File][MPEG Tools �K]

- Select tab [Simple De-multiplex]. Select your VCD (MPEG1) file as the input.

- By default it should set output files to the same directory. They are the video and audio stream of the MPEG1 video.

- Work on the audio part by open it in your favorite audio editor to do normalization. I use Sound Forge. Save the result audio file as .WAV (no compression).

- Back to TMPGMeg. Close [MPEG Tools �K] window. Now you are back to the main screen, where you can merge the audio and video stream to create a MPEG 1 video. We already have the video stream, which is the one you got in step 3. So select that .m1v file as the video source.

- For audio source, select the audio file you just manipulated.

- Select Output file name.

- Hit [Start] button. Now you will have a nice new MPEG1 file with video untouched and audio enhanced. I even throw the file into Song Clie movie converter and it worked flawlessly.