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Old October 9th 18, 08:19 PM posted to alt.windows7.general
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Default question for the video editor folks

"Mayayana" wrote in message
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"JBI" wrote

|I have several videos I've transferred over from VHS to digital. All
| are in MPEG2 format. I need to cut and edit some of them, but I'm
| having trouble finding a free editor that does so without re-encoding.
| Suggestions for freeware that would allow this without a re-encode would
| be welcome. Thank you.

I don't know enough to know the implications of
"re-encoding" issues, but I've had good luck with
Avidemux for my limited needs. It's basically a graphic
editor for video, providing basic functions like crop,
resize, rotate, color adjustment, borders, etc.


If you do any of those functions (crop, resize, rotate, color adjustment,
borders) with any package, you will always have to re-encode because you are
actually changing the data. Cutting out frames is essentially selectively
copying from source to destination, with a bit of re-encoding around each
join.

I spent most of a day at one point looking through
various options and Avidemux was by far the best.
However, I haven't tried anything like splicing or
minor snipping. The only cutting I've done has been
on the ends.


I use VideoReDo on Windows and it works perfectly. However it's not free.

I tried Avidemux on Linux Ubuntu as an alternative to VRD (which hasn't been
ported to Linux) but it doesn't always make perfect seamless edits.
Depending where you make the cuts in the sequence of P frames (full picture)
and I frames (differences from that reference P frame) you may hit on a case
where the join goes pixellated. VRD gets round that problem be re-encoding
the video from the cut point to the next P frame (typically about 10 frames)
so as to give a perfect sequence.

Apparently older versions of Avidemux used to be able to make flawless joins
but later ones can't always - sounds like one hell of a regression, and not
one that should have been allowed out of the door without being fixed.

VRD has the advantage that you see a time line of thumbail images of all the
frames either side of the frame that is currently displayed, which makes it
easier to see when a transition (eg from programme to advert "break bumper"
image) is coming up. It can also play the video at various speeds as you are
shuttling through to get the exact in and out points: I find I can locate
the correct frames more quickly than with Avidemux where it's basically full
speed or frame by frame.

I'm not sure whether there are other packages that do as good a job as VRD
but which are free.

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