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  1. Member
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    Can anyone tell me what is currently the best free way of doing frame accurate cutting of H.264 videos with minimal re-encoding?

    I have some home videos and just want to trim some of them a bit.
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  2. I've not used it myself, but VideoRedo seems to be mentioned on a regular basis. Apparently it's capable of "smart cutting".
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  3. Member yoda313's Avatar
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    Just an fyi videoredo is not freeware. I'm sure it has a trial mode to test it. But it shows a 50.00 usd price - and there are probably different packages available.
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  4. Member dragonkeeper's Avatar
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    Give SolveigMM AVI Trimmer + MKV a try, I have had great results with it in the past.

    Murphy's law taught me everything I know.
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    Thanks for the suggestions so far, but Videoredo is not free.
    SolveigMM AVI Trimmer looks good and I will probably try it for some other stuff, but the free version does not support MP4 files.

    I was trying Avidemux 2.6, but it is very difficult to navigate to the spot you want to trim. I suppose that is because it is still in beta?

    Any other ideas?
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  6. Member dragonkeeper's Avatar
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    Originally Posted by Ahari View Post
    SolveigMM AVI Trimmer looks good and I will probably try it for some other stuff, but the free version does not support MP4 files.

    Any other ideas?
    I only have one takes a little bit of work but it will get you around the mp4 issue with Solveig.
    1.) Use MkvMerge to convert mp4 to mkv.
    2.) Use SolveigMM AVI Trimmer+ MKV to trim file.
    If the resulting file must be mp4,.
    3) De-mux file with MKVextrtact.
    4) Mux files with Yamb.

    There may be a simpler way to achieve this, but i'm sure you get the idea.
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    Thanks, I will look into it.

    I was hoping for a simple solution where I could just find the spot, pause, mark it and delete. Done. I do have quite a few videos to get through.

    I may have been a bit optimistic.

    This must be something that lots of people are wanting to do as all the new video cameras record to AVC (H.264).

    I find it hard to believe that there is not a simple solution out there.

    Does anyone have any brilliant ideas or discoveries?
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    My discovery ... which may not be brilliant .. is that there aren't any really good free video editors.

    And the decent ones are not simple to use.
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  9. Member edDV's Avatar
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    Originally Posted by Ahari View Post
    Thanks, I will look into it.

    I was hoping for a simple solution where I could just find the spot, pause, mark it and delete. Done. I do have quite a few videos to get through.

    I may have been a bit optimistic.

    This must be something that lots of people are wanting to do as all the new video cameras record to AVC (H.264).

    I find it hard to believe that there is not a simple solution out there.

    Does anyone have any brilliant ideas or discoveries?
    H.264 is a GOP based format. You can cut on GOP I frames but that gets you far from frame accuracy. AVCHD max quality has 15 frame GOP (NTSC) or 12 frame GOP (PAL) for half second accuracy. Lower quality settings can lengthen the GOP resulting in less editing precision. Formats like DivX often use up to 300 frame GOPs resulting in 10 second edit accuracy.

    In order to cut inside the GOP, the GOP must first be decoded to frames. This is lossy and compute intensive. The user sees this as timeline stickiness. Alternatives are to use a digital intermediate that decodes the full clip to frames in advance, or shoot with a pro frame based format like DVCProHD or AVC-Intra (very expensive).

    Separate from the above is the concept of "smart render" which VideoRedo claims to do in their $95 "TVSuite with H.264" product. Smart render renders only the edited GOP or adjacent GOPs if necessary but copies the rest of the GOPs from source to output. This results in re-encode loss only in the GOP(s) surrounding the cut frame. Note that VideoReDo still has the sticky timeline issues.

    I was hoping for a simple solution where I could just find the spot, pause, mark it and delete. Done. I do have quite a few videos to get through.
    If you want productivity and edit with Premiere or Vegas, then your answer is the $129 Cineform Neoscene digital intermediate. The Neoscene capture program re-encodes AVCHD to 4:2:2 Cineform frames which are easily scanned/scrubbed on the timeline. After editing, you export to desired distribution format.
    http://cineform.com/products/neoscene

    There is no free lunch. If you want "free" frame accurate editing, go back to SD DV format.
    Last edited by edDV; 17th Apr 2012 at 12:35.
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    Thank you for the replies.

    I now realise that I was definitely too optimistic to hope for a good free editor.

    It looks like I am going to have to shell out some cash on this one!

    Can you guys help with some advice on which one to get?

    I have been doing a bit of searching and VideoRedo, AVS Video Editor and AVS Video ReMaker seem like good editors at a reasonable price - the AVS software seems to come in a sort of toolkit along with a bunch of other stuff.

    Also found Smart Cutter (Chinese-type English makes me nervous of this one!) and SolveigMM Video Splitter - this looks good.

    All these seem to be the so called "smart editor" type. I presume that is what I need to focus on?

    VideoRedo seems a little pricey and seems to be designed specifically for TV shows - does that matter?

    What about Adobe Premier elements?

    I am totally new to this video editing world, but I suppose as with anything once you get into it you quickly realise that you wish you had got the other editor you were looking at as it does something better, different or has some feature that is now very important and so on.

    I would prefer to not make a silly mistake I will live to regret. So with that in mind, I value your experienced input more than you can imagine!

    Any comments, guidance, advice or suggestions are very welcome and much appreciated.
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  11. Can anyone tell me what is currently the best free way of doing frame accurate cutting of H.264 videos with minimal re-encoding?
    in line with edDV...
    Frame accurate cutting of H.264 videos? and FreeWare?
    just forget it.
    250~300 frames here-n-there does not matter much with freewares, inaccuracy of maximum 12 seconds.
    It's just the frames, not the Gold! Aha!
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  12. avisynth + ffms2 + avspmod

    you have to reencode no matter what though
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  13. Member edDV's Avatar
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    Most of the "cutter" "splitter" editors cut on I frames.

    As far as I know, VideoRedo "TVSuite with H.264" is their only product that will "smart render" AVCHD.

    Vegas will smart render MPeg2 (HDV, XDCAM etc) but not h.264 yet. Both Vegas and Premiere need to re-encode h.264 (entire clip) to do frame accurate editing.

    Cineform Neoscene can be added to any of the current Vegas or Adobe products. It will also work with others in most cases but without formal support from Cineform. Another big plus for Neoscene is 24p support for HDV and AVCHD formats.
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    I've been doing some more searching!

    Any thoughts on PowerDirector 10? It seems to have everything at a fair price ($80)!
    It looks like it will also do my frame accurate smart cutting on the individual video clips - I'm not too sure on that, but it definitely seems to do it for full blown movie making.

    I suppose one clip that is trimmed is a movie!
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    Just an update for anyone interested.

    I ended up buying PowerDirector 10 to edit my movies - I'm very happy with it.

    PowerDirector 10 is a little too involved to just do simple cutting of clips for my archive (it can actually do a very good job of it, just not quickly and easily! - movie compilation is what it is meant for), so I also bought Smart Cutter for $50.

    Smart Cutter is not perfect (none are perfect) and not pretty, but after quite a bit of testing, it far outperforms the other "smart" cutters - faster (very fast!), less blocking and artefacts (almost none), quick and easy to use and includes a lifetime of free upgrades.

    The awful English originally put me off this product, but it's performance outweighs the bad English on the website and in the help files. It is perfectly understandable and a lot better than my Chinese!! (or whatever the author's nationality is). the help files are a little sloppy, but good enough to get me going in a few minutes.

    I'm a happy camper (for now)!!

    Thanks to everyone on this forum for your input - what a great resource of info and helpful people!
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    As a newbie to videos myself, here is what I have learnt so far on this very issue.

    In my opinion, having just spent a lot of time looking into just that, Smart Cutter is the way to go. Quick and simple - only downside is it is a little pricey for what you get, but I am happy with it. It works well for me!

    If you really don't like the rather crude (but efficient) GUI, then 2nd choice would be the much prettier SolveigMM Video Splitter. The SolveigMM Video Splitter trial did tend to crash on my system sometimes and I had to re-install it once to get it working again. There is a small possiblity that my RAM was starting to fail as I have just had to replace a RAM stick. You have to get the paid version to cut AVC (H.264) movies though - the free version only does AVI files.

    Smart cutter was easier to use and much quicker to find your trim frame. It has a very clever 2 slider system for quickly finding the frame you want to cut from - works better than all the others I tried.

    Nothing will work perfectly, but Smart Cutter comes close. The problem is in the file format. H.264 was meant for storage of videos, not for editing. The only perfect way to trim H.264 videos would be to convert it to AVI, edit it and convert it back to H.264 for storage. The downside of this approach is the time taken to do this and all the re-encoding will definitely result in loss of quality.

    edDV's solution of the $129 Cineform Neoscene is probably the best quality way out of this sticky situation, but you still need and editor as this is sort of like a helper in the background converting your videos to a more suitable form for editing (as I understand it). Some of the comments I read (can't remember where) said that it may not even be needed anymore as some of the latest editors are now starting to support H.264 video natively.

    This brings me back to my reason for choosing to just buy Smart Cutter - relatively cheap and does the job quickly and easily with minimal fuss. No fiddling with codecs and settings, it just matches the source video and adds a teenie bit of extra quality to try and compensate for the inevitable small loss in quality from the small parts at the beginning and ends of the video that have to be re-encoded in order to trim the video.

    Sometimes there are small artefacts in the trimmed video (I have only tested it with about 10 videos clips so far), but from my research and testing, Smart Cutter has by far the least artefacts.

    Basically, if Smart Cutter can't do it perfectly, then it can't be done without a full re-encode.

    Hope this helps!! I nearly tore my hair out trying to come up with a suitable solution and can't believe that no-one has perfected this yet!
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    I forgot to mention, I did look at lots of others and only these 2 made it to my final list as most of the others are not frame accurate and simply cut on the I-frames or did a full re-encode. Some even claimed to be frame accurate, but on digging deeper, were not.

    One feature missing from Smart Cutter is the ability to check out where the nearest I-frame is and then to choose to go to another frame if it is not suitable. The best cuts will always be on the I-frames and perfect cuts with absolutely no re-encoding can only be made on the IDR frames, but these are few and far between! Look it up if you want more info - I just glossed over the pertinent info regarding I-frames and IDR frames. Hope I even got the terminology correct!
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    A quick follow up for those that are interested:

    Only install Smart Cutter in the default location and don't play with the options - it doesn't like it!

    I have now edited about 40 clips perfectly with no artefacts at all!

    Great program - a bit fiddly until I realised not to meddle with the default settings and installation.

    Does what I want fast and simply.
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    I find AVS Video Remaker works well with H.264/AVC encoded .flv files. Irecord the occasional late night movie using a USB stick on a set top box whichhas EPG. This is very easy to set up (just edit the record details to give anextra few minutes at the beginning and especially at the end to make sure youget the full movie) and produces 2 GB .TS files. You can lump them all togetherin AVS Video Converter which will convert them all and combine into 1 file. Iuse .flv as it is H.264/AVC with MPEG-2/4 audio and gives a reasonable filesize with good quality which plays easily. The original .TS files are listed as720 x 576 although they are in widescreen. I know the 576 refers to the numberof lines but I'm damned if I can understand the relationship between lines andpixels. To be sure I get widescreen I set the converted output to 1024 x 576but I haven't played with this yet. AVS Video Converter is also useful in thatsome downloaded videos from YouTube are in a 4:3 format and should be 16:9;Video Converter can force a conversion to a 16:9 output. Video Remaker is generallyframe accurate but with some files it will only split at key frames. Even a.flv file from another source may have this restriction; I don't know why but Ijust use Video Converter to convert it to the same format (.flv) and frameaccuracy is again available. Quality doesn't seem to suffer. This may beanother option if you already have these programs.


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  20. The original post talked of 'frame accurate' cutting of H.264 for free....well, you can do that (although you do have to re-encode, obviously).

    The Cineform HD codec, as used by Cineform Neoscene mentioned earlier by edDV is now freeware.

    Here's a copy of a post I did a while back, for someone in another forum, looking to cut AVCHD footage with frame accuracy... for free...

    You need to download the 'GoPro Cineform Studio' free package. - See here:

    http://gopro.com/3d-cineform-studio-software-download/

    Now that Cineform is owned by Go-pro, they have decided, in their wisdom, to release the 'Studio' version of their software for free.

    Now I'm not a 'Go Pro' user - nor do I have any particular interest in the '3D' aspect of this product.

    But what is does include is the Cineform HD codec --which I thought was worth checking out?

    It works very well in the VFW environment, which made me wonder if........

    Step 1 - install 'GoPro Cineform Studio'. (It's not necessary to run it at this stage -- we're only after the codec for this project!!)

    Step 2 - convert your AVCHD footage form .mts to .avi, using this freebie:

    http://sourceforge.net/projects/mp4cam2avi/

    (No re-encoding, just a label change, so no quality loss, and quick!)

    Step 3 - (Making sure you already have the VFW x264 codec installed in Virtualdub) - Open your new '.avi' in Vdub.

    Step 4 -- Because the Cineform codec is VFW, it will appear in the Vdub codec list.

    Step 5 - Using whatever filters you care to - or not? -- export your footage as Cineform HD (you can configure the codec, to suit whatever you're after.)

    So, high quality intermediate intraframe files, for use with your editor ... or even Virtualdub .....

    ... and all for free!.......
    Last edited by pippas; 25th Nov 2012 at 07:55.
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  21. Originally Posted by edDV View Post
    H.264 is a GOP based format. You can cut on GOP I frames but that gets you far from frame accuracy. AVCHD max quality has 15 frame GOP (NTSC) or 12 frame GOP (PAL) for half second accuracy. Lower quality settings can lengthen the GOP resulting in less editing precision. Formats like DivX often use up to 300 frame GOPs resulting in 10 second edit accuracy.

    There is no free lunch. If you want "free" frame accurate editing, go back to SD DV format.
    Old post but worth pointing out I think ...

    Cutting on I frames isn't reliable either, the only guaranteed cut is on IDR frames

    "In H.264 I frames are not guaranteed to be a clean cut points. The only frames in H.264 that you can safely cut on and guarantee no corruption is an IDR frame. In H.264 the B frames can reference any other from +/- 32 frames from it's position, even surpassing an I frame bounds. When you cut on an I frame in VRD we do not recode any of the video, so it's possible that one of the B frames before or after the cut actually references one of the frames in the portion of the video that you just cut out. When this happens that B frame will decode improperly and every frame that references it will also be decoded improperly resulting in corruption."

    http://www.videoredo.net/msgBoard/showpost.php?p=87558&postcount=17
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    Here I find a craxx v4.21, it works perfect for me.

    PS. just replace the *.dll to your installation folder to craxx.

    Link removed
    Last edited by Baldrick; 28th Dec 2012 at 02:55. Reason: No warez or cracks. Buy your software.
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  23. Thanks for the suggestions so fa
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  24. This is a really interesting topic as I've been searching for years for an easy way to do this. The last video software I bought was TMPGenc but haven't used it again since I moved to ubuntu.

    What has always seemed to work for me is a variation on dragonkeeper's process.

    1. Use an editor like Avidemux (free) to jot down your timecodes where you want to split.
    2. Drag the mp4 or open it up in mkvmergeGUI and hit the start muxing button. This will create an mkv file.
    3. Clear the files in mkvmergeGUI and drag in the new mkv.
    4. Split the file under the Global tab by entering the timecodes.
    5. Convert back to mp4

    I don't know if this is "perfectly" frame accurate, but it has always produced good seekable files that seem to be where I cut them. (Never had a reason to verify yet.) I don't know if it makes a difference but I try to use the keyframes buttons in Avidemux to select my cutpoints. Maybe one of the technical gurus can chime in on this.

    If I try to do the cutting in Avidemux alone It seems to make a good file at the cutpoints I want but then the seeking gets haywire and out of sync.

    This is by no means quick and easy, but the point is that a good bash or python scripter could make a nice script to automate it all by just entering the right timecode split points. I'm attaching the bash script I use to convert back to mp4 in case anyone is interested. I copied it from superuser.com and included the post and the script in the same file. This is more directed at making apple compatible mp4's so make sure to read the help to make sure if it's what you need, or you can go here yourself. (Answer #3)
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  25. Member yoda313's Avatar
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    I know grave digging is frowned upon here but this is my exact topic so I thought I'd use it.

    Is videoredo the best for h264 cutting still?

    I have used the cutter in the hauppauge hdpvr2 capture software but you have to do it twice to cut out the beginning and then ending of a clip. It would be even worse for a capture with commercials. That leads to lots of temporary files that can get cumbersome. edit - and it doesn't let you frame advance which is a pain to get the right spot you want to trim.

    Is there something better than videoredo or is that the best available right now?

    Thanks.

    (not looking to spend more than 50.00 usd or so for it -edit just saw that the version of videoredo that does the cutting is a 100.00 usd - if its the only one that works right for frame accurate h264 I'll consider it at that price).
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  26. Member dragonkeeper's Avatar
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    Try SolveigMM AVI Trimmer + MKV. Seems that I've used that in in the past with good results.
    Last edited by dragonkeeper; 15th Mar 2014 at 17:11. Reason: Spelling
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  27. Member racer-x's Avatar
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    Maybe try TSsniper
    Last edited by racer-x; 16th Mar 2014 at 02:49.
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  28. Member yoda313's Avatar
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    Thanks. I'll try the suggestions.

    Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk
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  29. You could try TMPGEnc MPEG Smart Renderer, I haven't used it myself but some recommend it here.
    Sometime I'll give it a try to see how I like it.
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