Lossless editing of .m2t (MPEG-2 TS) in Avisynth

Tigon · Member Joined: 02 May 2007 Location: South Africa

I have seached everywhere for this information, but cannot find a ok asnwer to this:

I am shooting HDV with my Sony cam, and "capturing" the footage with HDVsplit, which generates a .M2T file.
Can I lossless edit this file using Avisynth? Or do I need to use a heavier NLE, such as Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0?

My idea is to "decode" the footage in Avisynt using DGdecode, do the editing and save it again back to MPEG - LOSSLESS - using QuEnc/Huffyuv/Lagarith.

I want to save it back to any lossless format, but what I can do now is to copy the .m2t file to a DVD and play it back on a Sony PSP3 without loss.
I do understand that completely lossless is impossible, but what is the best way?

Thanks for the help

guns1inger · Member Joined: 01 Apr 2004 Location: Miskatonic U

You can edit with avisynth, however all it is is a (very good and sophisticated) frameserver. Your video goes in one end, uncompressed video comes out the other. In that respect it is lossless, however you then have to re-encode the video, which will entail some loss. You certainly cannot save to mpeg as lossless, as it is, by definition, a lossy codec. Huffyuv. Lagarith, and a dozen others are visually lossless or truely lossless, but you can only play them back from a PC.

What you ideally want is something like VideoRedo or Womble Mpeg Wizard, which will let you edit your video, and stream unchanged video without re-encoding, while only re-encoding new segments. I don't know if either of these will handle HD streams though.
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racer-x · Posted: May 08, 2007 08:23

If you want to do just cuts losslesly, you can use MpegStreamClip. It's free, but you'll need Quicktime Pro or Quicktime Alternative installed first.

Do all your cuts and export to "TS" (you can rename the extension back to m2t or mpg) and your video will just be cut on "I" frames, no re-encoding will be done.
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