Splicing / editing H264 with zero or minimal re-encoding?

[Asterra]

Looks like I have a couple of weeks of free time to devote to one of my many backburnered video projects. This time I choose to create what I am calling a homemade "money shot" bluray. The premise: Excise certain standout scenes from my various Blurays (examples: train wreck from Super 8, light cycle battle from Tron) and sequence them together, one after the other, complete with 7.1 surround fully intact, and with no re-encoding. Minor edits would be things like a brief title indicating the scene to come, and fading in/fading out each scene.

In order to accomplish this in a reasonably painless fashion, there needs to exist an editor which is designed to handle H264 in a non-transcode fashion. Ideally, it would work the same way certain editors handle MPEG2: There would be no re-encoding unless edits were made (titles, etc.) which made it unavoidable, at which time the affected frames would be indicated as being in need of re-encoding. And when the time came to do so, the unaffected frames would remain intact, identical to the data that was imported. I realize there are reasons why handling H264 in this way might potentially be a taller order than dealing with MPEG2.

That's probably my first question: What editor(s) should I be looking at for working with / editing / splicing H264 in a non-destructive fashion?

On the topic of audio, things are already a little more clear-cut. Thanks to my experience in developing a 7.1-channel home video Bluray, I already know that if need be, I can just convert everything to LPCM and just mux in raw 7.1. But in doing so, I would most likely be sacrificing the option to create a Bluray from the result because raw 7.1 clocks in at around 10Mbps and this, combined with the video portion, would probably exceed the spec here and there. So I'm hoping there's a realistic solution for creating a 7.1-channel TrueHD file (DTS-MA is probably still very much outside of the realm of the feasible, not that I care). If not, then an MKV file will have to do.

Thanks for any help!

[Baldrick]

Videoredo h264 tvsuite or SolveigMM Video Splitter are good h264 editors. But I doubt they support 7.1 surround...


I think you can use dvdfab to cut out chapters. But I haven't seen anything like dvdshrink for blu-rays where you can easily cut out exact clips.

[yoda313]

You might run into problems if you get a bluray that is mpeg2 (high def sourced) or vc1. You might end up having to do SOME kind of reencoding if the editor you use can't read all the types of bluray.

But if you just want to take the scenes and make them there own section on the disc I don't think that should be a problem.

I've never authored a bluray so I don't know for sure.

Can you author a bluray with all three codecs? Or does it have to contain just one of each type per disc - ie only vc1 only mpeg2 etc?

[Asterra]

But if you just want to take the scenes and make them there own section on the disc I don't think that should be a problem.

That's not quite what I'm after. I definitely aim to have the entire project be a single muxed video file; ie not individual sections that simply play one after the other (that wouldn't be all that seamless, I'm thinking).

Can you author a bluray with all three codecs? Or does it have to contain just one of each type per disc - ie only vc1 only mpeg2 etc?

Actually, I'm taking it for granted that every movie I plan to make use of has been encoded as MPEG4-AVC. In my experience, every VC-1 encode has been a legacy HD-DVD title and generally unusable, and every MPEG2 encode has been a legacy Bluray from the dark days of single-layer and "we don't want to pay for VC-1 and we don't know how to use MPEG4", and this unfortunate mating has invariably resulted in some pretty awful video (see: Robocop). If I'm wrong, I'll cross that bridge as need be. ;p

[Asterra]

Videoredo h264 tvsuite or SolveigMM Video Splitter are good h264 editors. But I doubt they support 7.1 surround...

Thanks as always. The description for SolveigMM Video Splitter makes it sound like it's precisely what I was after. I do see people have had problems with Videoredo's H264 side, which is actually not too surprising; I expected bizarre issues when handling aggressively interframe video in an editing environment.

The 7.1 surround is something I will tackle from within Premiere Pro, treating it as eight mono channels.

[qwerty83]

According to my experience frame accurate editing of h264 videos (without re encoding) is not possible (at least for now).
The only solution is to cut on IDR frames (if there are any). Even cutting on I-frames is not safe.

Even those software that claim to have a 'smart copy' function to edit h264 videos (like avidemux has for mpeg4 asp videos) are not very reliable for that particular task.

[Asterra]

SolveigMM's solution to this is to re-encode small bits at the cut points. I'm fine with that, since I plan to fade in/out at such points anyway. It remains to be seen just what manner of re-encoding takes place.

[Asterra]

Here are my experiences with the two apps recommended earlier.

1) SolveigMM Video Splitter. Able to open MKV files made with MakeMKV. Seeking to a specific frame is problematic. Although the hour:minuteecond:frame are specified for the cursor, start and end points, one cannot type in specific numbers on any of the entries. The only way to reach a specific frame is to click the arrows next to the start/end points and scroll to your desired frame, one frame at a time. This is a wholly tedious process because each click results in a 5-10 second wait while the program does whatever processing is necessary to bring up the next frame. Once in a while, it will either get stuck processing (necessitating ending the task) or crash outright. I actually have not yet been able to locate both a start and an end point before having to restart the program. Also a problem is the curious fact that the frames rendered on-screen are postage stamp-sized - even smaller than the preview frames in the timeline! This makes it exceedingly difficult to discern whether a given frame is the desired one. Verdict: Effectively unusable.

2) Videodedo h264 tvsuite. I tried this one second because I had immediately noticed people complaining specifically about this program's h264 support. SolveigMM's failures forced me to try it out. Sadly, I have not yet been able to test anything with this program because it refuses to load h264 video. I have fed it MakeMKV's MKV (didn't like the DTS audio), raw h264 (couldn't load), h264 by itself in a MKV container created with MMG (couldn't load) and h264 by itself in an MP4 container created with mp4muxer (couldn't load). I dare to speculate that a less tenacious potential buyer might undergo some exasperation when attempting to make use of this software.

[DmitryV]

>>SolveigMM's failures forced me to try it out. Sadly, I have not yet been able to test anything with this program because it refuses to load h264 video. I
have fed it MakeMKV's MKV (didn't like the DTS audio), raw h264 (couldn't load),

Could you give us a sample of a file you can't load?

The Splitter supports avc ves stream, or what do you mean by raw 264?