Editing MKV ?

[txl]

Hello all,

I have 2 mkv (h264+mp3) files taken from an onboard camera of a race truck (1 front 1 rear) i would like to edit the race file and make a nice movie like switching to the back view when there is an overtaking and so on...

I have tried avidemux that loads the file perfectly, I can cut them but it's really a pain to do what i want, basically I'd like to have 2 'input' screens with the videos and 1 'output' and I would tell the program "from frame x to frame y use file 1 and then use file 2" and so on...

Is there anything doing this, free or not ?

Thanks

[poisondeathray]

You could use NLE's like vegas, premiere, but you usually have to repackage the .mkv into .ts / .m2ts or avi using either tsmuxer or avc2avi (support for .mkv container from commercial editors is poor) , or use avisynth to frameserve into premiere with the the avs import plugin. NLE would be my first choice, because you can overlay tracks (audio & video) on a storyboard/timeline and it's easy to do

For free alternatives, you could do it all with avisynth scripting, but it's a pain to do in my opinion. It's much easer with a NLE. You might be able to do it with blender or wax, but the features are more limited compared to vegas/premiere

[txl]

Ok, thanks for the tips, any idea if one of them is doing mkv's

I have checked the avisynth import into premiere and it seems to be a pain in the neck...

Thanks

[poisondeathray]

Ok, thanks for the tips, any idea if one of them is doing mkv's

I have checked the avisynth import into premiere and it seems to be a pain in the neck...

Thanks

It's pretty easy.

Install the premiere avs import plugin from sourceforge, you need avisynth, haali media splitter and ffdshow installed as well (h.264 decoding enabled)

The script is simple, open a text file in notepad in the same directory as your .mkv, write the following and rename the extension to .avs (change the filenames to match)

DirectShowSource("file.mkv")

Load that .avs directly in Premiere

You may find one of the rewrapping options easier; i.e. extract raw streams with mkvextract then rewrap with one of the mentioned programs above (just import the audio & video separately on the timeline)

Your camera doesn't record natively into .mkv container does it? You should use your original footage if you are doing farther editing

[txl]

the problem is that my camera records in shitty mpeg-ps so I have to transform in into h264, the filesize moves from 1g to 200 megs for a 20 minute video.

But maybe I should edit in mp2 provided they can do this and then remux in h264 into mkv....

[poisondeathray]

Yes, but if you start with the .mkv for this process, you have 2 generations of quality loss instead of 1. I would start with the original then encode to h.264 for the final format

Also, all the NLE's (at least recent versions) should be able to edit MPEG-PS without difficulty

If you already discarded the original footage, you can rewrap also into .mp4 (e.g using yamb), so lots of options here...