question for the video editor folks

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.

"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 fort video, providing basic functions like crop,
resize, rotate, color adjustment, borders, etc.

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.

On 10/09/2018 10:26 AM, Mayayana wrote:
"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 fort video, providing basic functions like crop,
resize, rotate, color adjustment, borders, etc.

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.


Hi, yes, I use Avidemux fairly regularly. In fact, I have it working on
an edited video right now that is being re-encoded because I want to
share on the web. However, I don't think there's any way to edit
without re-encoding. There is a "copy" option, but I don't see any way
to keep the format without some sort of re-encode. Looked for
tutorials/ instructions, but no luck.

"Mayayana" schreef in bericht
news
"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,


Unneccesary loss of video quality and time.
BTW I do use a utility for cutting mp3 files without recoding (for the same
reason),
mp3direct cut.
But I don't have an answer to your question.


--


|\ /|
| \/ |@rk
\../
\/os

"Mayayana" wrote in message
news
"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.

NY wrote:

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.

It's the "cutting out frames" case which can be done without
re-encoding. You have to cut on GOP boundaries to make it work.

And at least one video standard, there's a software that
allows cutting any frame, and just the current GOP needs
to be re-worked to meld the ends properly.

You can use FFMPEG to join videos on GOP boundaries.
I've done that with Cinepak encoded content. Being
careful to make each segment a multiple of the GOP
size. (I.e. a 12 frame GOP, a 12000 frame segment,
so one movie chunk has 1000 GOPs in it.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_of_pictures

"I picture or I frame (intra coded picture) –
a picture that is coded independently of all other pictures."

Those take up more space than the other frames, but
they're also the secret to lossless editing (on roughly
half-second boundaries). This isn't sufficiently
accurate editing for most people - you'd need some
generous fade-to-blacks to work that way.

I've studied the data rate of videos, using ffprobe,
and having it dump packets to an output file. And you
can post-process the file and get size info, to show
the size of an I-frame, versus the others. You'll easily
be able to see the cadence. (Media info tools will tell
you the GOP value, without doing all of that. But this is
part of the fun of studying stuff.)

The largest GOP value is around 600 frames. And that's
not a popular value to try either. Using that is for
bar bets (ugliest, least responsive video).

Paul

In message , Paul
writes:
[]
It's the "cutting out frames" case which can be done without
re-encoding. You have to cut on GOP boundaries to make it work.

And at least one video standard,

Do you know which one?

there's a software that
allows cutting any frame, and just the current GOP needs
to be re-worked to meld the ends properly.

Which software - or is it (your beloved) FFMPEG as you describe below?

You can use FFMPEG to join videos on GOP boundaries.
I've done that with Cinepak encoded content. Being
careful to make each segment a multiple of the GOP
size. (I.e. a 12 frame GOP, a 12000 frame segment,
so one movie chunk has 1000 GOPs in it.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_of_pictures
[]
The largest GOP value is around 600 frames. And that's
(Wow, 20 seconds for NTSC!)
not a popular value to try either. Using that is for
bar bets (ugliest, least responsive video).
[]
I've looked at the Wikipedia article (after at first reading about the
Grand Old Party! [Which I was fascinated to read was originally
liberal!!]), and it gives the impression that the GOP size is generally
fixed; that surprised me - I'd always assumed they varied with content
(e. g. a scene cut requiring a new I frame, a static picture not needing
any after the first).
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

User Error: Replace user, hit any key to continue.

"J. P. Gilliver (John)" wrote in message
...
I've looked at the Wikipedia article and it gives the impression that the
GOP size is generally fixed; that surprised me - I'd always assumed they
varied with content (e. g. a scene cut requiring a new I frame, a static
picture not needing any after the first).

Yes, my understanding is that GOPs are normally a fixed spacing, especially
on DVDs, but they are a *maximum* number of intermediate differential frames
before the next full frame, and that it makes a lot of sense to put a new
full frame at every shot change, to avoid having huuuuge difference frames
between the last full one and the current frame of a new shot. Broadcast TV
seems to be more tolerate of larger GOPs than DVDs which impose a smaller
maximum GOP size: when I've been encoding recordings of home movies to put
on DVD, I've seen a message "GOP size too high - will need partial recoding"
in VideoRedo.

As I understand it, you can cut on any frame boundary, even joining two
unrelated differential frames, as long as your software generates new full
frames (by taking the last full one in the second clip and applying all the
subsequent differences up to the "out" cut point) and then calculates brand
new difference frames from that point to the next full frame.

AIUI that's how Video Redo makes seamless edits which don't have to be on
GOP boundaries. You can even see on the status dialogue, it says "copying
frames" and then briefly, at each edit point "recoding frames". I presume it
is this re-encoding around the edit point that Avidemux and other
FFMPEG-based software doesn't do properly.

VRD even has a setting which allows you to vary the bit rate of the
generated frames. I noticed when I was removing the commercials from
low-bitrate, low-resolution (544x576) recordings on Yesterday, Drama etc, I
sometimes got a lot of compression noise at the join. I was advised by VRD
support to set a per-recording value of minimum bitrate which is ignored for
the majority of the recording when you are just copying source to
destination, but is used when any full and difference frames have to be
generated.

(Note that I use terms "full" and "difference" because I can never remember
which of those are termed I and which are termed P or B! I'd thought it was
P for picture (full) and I for intermediate, but from comments up-thread I
think I may be wrong.)

J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:
In message , Paul
writes:
[]
It's the "cutting out frames" case which can be done without
re-encoding. You have to cut on GOP boundaries to make it work.

And at least one video standard,

Do you know which one?

there's a software that
allows cutting any frame, and just the current GOP needs
to be re-worked to meld the ends properly.

Which software - or is it (your beloved) FFMPEG as you describe below?

You can use FFMPEG to join videos on GOP boundaries.
I've done that with Cinepak encoded content. Being
careful to make each segment a multiple of the GOP
size. (I.e. a 12 frame GOP, a 12000 frame segment,
so one movie chunk has 1000 GOPs in it.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_of_pictures
[]
The largest GOP value is around 600 frames. And that's
(Wow, 20 seconds for NTSC!)
not a popular value to try either. Using that is for
bar bets (ugliest, least responsive video).
[]
I've looked at the Wikipedia article (after at first reading about the
Grand Old Party! [Which I was fascinated to read was originally
liberal!!]), and it gives the impression that the GOP size is generally
fixed; that surprised me - I'd always assumed they varied with content
(e. g. a scene cut requiring a new I frame, a static picture not needing
any after the first).
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

User Error: Replace user, hit any key to continue.

I'll throw out two likely candidates, but I didn't check for sure, and Paul
may know.

SolveigMM Video Splitter
VideoReDoPlus

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 did a search on the Internet and found some (using "free video cutter" as
the search phrase).

The first one that came up was Fast MPEG Cut, bu there were some others.
https://free-fast-mpeg-cut.en.uptodown.com/windows

Here is another one:

https://filehippo.com/download_free_...cutter_joiner/

On 10/09/2018 04:45 PM, Bill in Co wrote:
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 did a search on the Internet and found some (using "free video cutter" as
the search phrase).

The first one that came up was Fast MPEG Cut, bu there were some others.
https://free-fast-mpeg-cut.en.uptodown.com/windows

Here is another one:

https://filehippo.com/download_free_...cutter_joiner/

Thanks. Tried both of those, but couldn't figure out how to cut, believe
it or not. They seemed to want to split, but that was it.

Hello JBI,

On 10/09/2018 04:45 PM, Bill in Co wrote:

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 did a search on the Internet and found some (using "free video
cutter" as the search phrase).

The first one that came up was Fast MPEG Cut, bu there were some
others. https://free-fast-mpeg-cut.en.uptodown.com/windows

Here is another one:

https://filehippo.com/download_free_...cutter_joiner/

Thanks. Tried both of those, but couldn't figure out how to cut,
believe it or not. They seemed to want to split, but that was it.


Try https://www.nchsoftware.com/videopad/

JBI wrote on 10/10/2018 1:19 AM:
I have several videos I've transferred over from VHS to digital.Â* All
are in MPEG2 format.Â* 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.Â* Thank you.

Can I add a related question, please??

After copying many VHS tapes to digital, when I edit the Digital files,
cutting out unwanted bits, I would want to add Date/Occurrence "slides"
to the edit, e.g.

Dora's 21st Birthday
First of April, 1999
Central Park, New York

Or, maybe ...

Wedding of
Dick and Dora
St Patrick's Church
Sydney, Australia
21/12/1995

That type of thing ... at the start of, or between scenes for, say
fifteen seconds.

Is this possible and, if so, which program would you recommend??

TIA

--
Daniel

"Daniel60" wrote in message
news
JBI wrote on 10/10/2018 1:19 AM:
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.

Can I add a related question, please??

After copying many VHS tapes to digital, when I edit the Digital files,
cutting out unwanted bits, I would want to add Date/Occurrence "slides" to
the edit, e.g.

Dora's 21st Birthday
First of April, 1999
Central Park, New York

Or, maybe ...

Wedding of
Dick and Dora
St Patrick's Church
Sydney, Australia
21/12/1995

That type of thing ... at the start of, or between scenes for, say fifteen
seconds.

Is this possible and, if so, which program would you recommend??

Hmm. You could use something like Adobe Premiere for inserting the still
captions (either between clips or overlaid on the start of a new sequence)
and just take the performance hit of having to re-encode the whole project.
Or you could use FFMPEG to generate a short MPEG clips consisting of
sequence of stills (which are all the same), and then insert that between
the existing clips. I've done the latter with a DVD that I made for someone.
I may actually have used Premiere to generate the caption segments, rather
than using FFMPEG, but I still joined those to the video clips with
VideRedo.

To make an MPEG from a sequence of stills, you use "ffmpeg -f image2 -i
image*d.png -pix_fmt yuv420p caption.mpeg" where the caption stills are
called image1.png, image2.png etc. The "-f image2" says "the input files are
PNG" and the "-pixfmt yuv420p" tells FFMPEG to force the output frames to be
YUV (luminance and two colour difference) when the input stills are RGB (PNG
stores pictures as RGB). If your stills are JPEG, you may get away without
either of those extra parameters.

You *may* get away with using AVIdemux instead of VideoRedo, but you may
fall foul of AVIdemuxe's rather naive way of joining video which doesn't
recode frames around the edit point and so may lead to brief pixellation if
the separate sections are not on full-frame boundaries and are instead
difference-from-the-last-full frames.

NY wrote on 10/10/2018 8:48 PM:
"Daniel60" wrote in message
news
JBI wrote on 10/10/2018 1:19 AM:
I have several videos I've transferred over from VHS to digital.Â* All
are in MPEG2 format.Â* 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.Â* Thank you.

Can I add a related question, please??

After copying many VHS tapes to digital, when I edit the Digital
files, cutting out unwanted bits, I would want to add Date/Occurrence
"slides" to the edit, e.g.

Dora's 21st Birthday
First of April, 1999
Central Park, New York

Or, maybe ...

Wedding of
Dick and Dora
St Patrick's Church
Sydney, Australia
21/12/1995

That type of thing ... at the start of, or between scenes for, say
fifteen seconds.

Is this possible and, if so, which program would you recommend??

Hmm. You could use something like Adobe Premiere for inserting the still
captions (either between clips or overlaid on the start of a new
sequence) and just take the performance hit of having to re-encode the
whole project. Or you could use FFMPEG to generate a short MPEG clips
consisting of sequence of stills (which are all the same), and then
insert that between the existing clips. I've done the latter with a DVD
that I made for someone. I may actually have used Premiere to generate
the caption segments, rather than using FFMPEG, but I still joined those
to the video clips with VideRedo.

To make an MPEG from a sequence of stills, you use "ffmpeg -f image2 -i
image*d.png -pix_fmt yuv420p caption.mpeg" where the caption stills are
called image1.png, image2.png etc. The "-f image2" says "the input files
are PNG" and the "-pixfmt yuv420p" tells FFMPEG to force the output
frames to be YUV (luminance and two colour difference) when the input
stills are RGB (PNG stores pictures as RGB). If your stills are JPEG,
you may get away without either of those extra parameters.

You *may* get away with using AVIdemux instead of VideoRedo, but you may
fall foul of AVIdemuxe's rather naive way of joining video which doesn't
recode frames around the edit point and so may lead to brief pixellation
if the separate sections are not on full-frame boundaries and are
instead difference-from-the-last-full frames.

Thanks for that, NY. At least you've shown it is possible.

--
Daniel