Help Me with simple AVI edit?

[ts1971]

Hi,

Apologies in advance for what is probably a pretty basic question, but I'm stuck and I need some help. Though I know nothing about video technology / formats / encoding etc, I do know something about computers and based on that a friend has asked me to do some simple, one time editing on some avis files he generated. The situation is this: he provided me with twentyish avi files, each about 2GB in length and running just under 20 minutes. I need to accomplish the follwing two things:
(1) Rotate the image 270 degrees.

(2) Delete various sections from within the files. (the files are different and the sections to be deleted are different, so I'm not looking to automate this process) The use case here is the same as, say, editing commercials out of a television program would be. The footage is actually nature footage shot with a mounted camera and the sections to be removed in practice might be pretty long, on the order of half of the running time of hte video.

This is a one-off kind of thing so neither of us is willing to spend any money on commercial software. Also, we would like the final result to be avi and encoded identically to the input files. I expected this to be easy but having spent the better part of a day on it and having played prety extensivly with both avidemux and virtualDub, I haven't really made any headway.

First I tried avidemux and I was able to edit out the dead sections. However I was surprised to find that after deleting say 10 minutes from a 20 minute video that the size of the file had actually grown very slightly. I can live with this I guess, though it's strange and makes me wonder if I'm doing something wrong. The road block I hit with Avidemux was the rotation part. It does have a rotation filter, but for some reason won't let you apply it unless you are also changing the output format / encoding. Just for fun, I tried mpeg4 and it generated the file, but the result wasn't playable.

I didn't even get that far with virtual dub. After installing / running the software it looked like I was going to be able to apply the rotate filter without changing the output type, but 10 minutes after kicking off the process I realized that the output file had grown to over 200GB. Obviously I quit at that point.

Could some experts on the forum point me towards some free software that will accomplish what I'm trying to do? Or maybe explain to me how I'm using one of the two utilities I've already used wrong. I'm really stuck here!

Thanks in advance!

[manono]

The road block I hit with Avidemux was the rotation part. It does have a rotation filter, but for some reason won't let you apply it unless you are also changing the output format / encoding.!

For some reason? The reason is that you can't filter (rotate) without reencoding.

After installing / running the software it looked like I was going to be able to apply the rotate filter without changing the output type, but 10 minutes after kicking off the process I realized that the output file had grown to over 200GB. Obviously I quit at that point.

Without changing the output type, yes, depending on what that 'type' is, but you still have to choose and configure a codec. You were getting a huge file because you were encoding as uncompressed, the default choice.

Maybe begin by posting the text information MediaInfo gives you about this AVI.

[ts1971]

[QUOTE=manono;2335528]

Maybe begin by posting the text information MediaInfo gives you about this AVI.

Hi manono and thanks for taking the time to reply. I've installed MediaInfo and here is the basic information for one of the files in question:

General
Complete name : E:\myfolder\myfile.AVI
Format : AVI
Format/Info : Audio Video Interleave
File size : 2.01 GiB
Duration : 20mn 0s
Overall bit rate : 14.4 Mbps

Video
ID : 0
Format : JPEG
Codec ID : MJPG
Duration : 19mn 59s
Bit rate : 35.4 Mbps
Width : 1 920 pixels
Height : 1 080 pixels
Display aspect ratio : 16:9
Frame rate : 30.000 fps
Color space : YUV
Chroma subsampling : 4:2:0
Bit depth : 8 bits
Compression mode : Lossy
Bits/(Pixel*Frame) : 0.570
Stream size : 4.95 GiB

Audio
ID : 1
Format : PCM
Format settings, Endianness : Little
Format settings, Sign : Signed
Codec ID : 1
Duration : 20mn 0s
Bit rate mode : Constant
Bit rate : 128 Kbps
Channel(s) : 1 channel
Sampling rate : 8 000 Hz
Bit depth : 16 bits
Stream size : 18.3 MiB (1%)
Alignment : Aligned on interleaves
Interleave, duration : 511 ms (15.34 video frames)

Let me know if there is any other information I can supply.

[manono]

An MJPEG AVI. Okay. Within VDub, if you have the XviD or DivX codecs installed, you can choose one of them (under Video->Compression, followed by Configure) and export as an XviD AVI. Maybe choose a single-pass conversion for Quant 3. The size will shrink considerably and the quality should be decent. Your audio is crap and you can either keep it unchanged (DirectStream) or convert it to MP3 (if you have that installed).

Other programs (such as the AVIDemux you tried earlier) will allow you to convert to other formats. VDub will too, but not without installing some additional stuff.

[ts1971]

Thanks manono, that worked great and the resultant file is about 500 mb which is a nice bonus. I think that there was a bit of loss of image quality but I guess that I can live with that.