Newbie requests help: How to make rendering easier

[Nearyn]

Hi everyone, I'm very new to using VSDC and I was wondering if someone could please help me.

I have some recordings, usually around about 3-5 hour long ones. I clean up the audio in audacity, I cut out and edit whatever I need to from the videos and then, once I have everything like I want it, in VSDC, I want to render.

Problem is, with video and audio and editing being seperate, I cannot simply cut the video and go straight into rendering.

My solution so far has been to, once I finish inserting the audio and doing whatever editing I want to, to render the whole thing out as one long 5-hour video, then taking that new video back into VSDC (where it is now only a video, not several different things precariously placed to sync up), and then start cutting it into 30 minute pieces and rendering them seperately.

Can someone please tell me if there is an easier way to do this? Thanks alot in advance.

-Nearyn

[hello_hello]

Why don't you edit the video and audio together, render it, then extract the audio from the output files(s) for clean up in Audacity?

When you say "render" are you re-encoding the video each time? Ideally, you'd only re-encode once, or even better, not at all if you're just cutting the video into sections, as each time you re-encode you lose a little quality. I've never used VSDC myself so I don't know what it's capable of.

[Nearyn]

So it's like this

Whenever I do this, I (usually) have 2 pieces of video and 3 bits of audio - 1 videofile with all the content, 1 videofile that acts as an introduction, a audiofile with background music to play over the introduction, an audiofile of me talking over the intro and finally a cleaned-up audio-file to replace the original sound on the video-file that contains the content.

What I do is this

After recording I have about 3 hours of video. Sometimes this videofile needs a bit of editing, cutting and splicing here and there, y'know. I note where these places are, before I start doing the actual work.

When I've made a note of where I edit and of stuff I cut out, I extract the audio into Audacity to clear away background noises, microphone hiss and so on. Then I edit the audio so it fits with the video-editing I mean to do.

I then record the intro audio and once that too has been cleaned, I take all the bits and put into VSDC. I edit the video as I've planned and remove the native audio from the file. I put in the intro video, put in the background music, the intro audio and finally the cleared content audio over the main video file.

This leaves me with basically a complete video, only its in the shape of a project-file, rather than anything playable - the video is usually about 3ish hours long. Then I want to get the whole thing converted to .avi format, which VSDC can do, but my problem is I would like to split the project into 30ish minute videos, rather than one long 3hour video. But I cannot figure out how to do it. The only thing I've been able to do so far is convert the whole thing to .avi, which takes about 3-5 hours. Then take that newly made video-file back into VSDC - now I don't have 5 seperate files, but 1 video-file, and that I can cut into pieces quite easily. Then I render them out in turn, usually about 5 videos, each taking around an hour each.

I've only recently started working with these videos and I'm quite certain I'm doing it wrong, or at least very suboptimally. Any helpful insights you can spare?

-Nearyn

[manono]

Then take that newly made video-file back into VSDC - now I don't have 5 seperate files, but 1 video-file, and that I can cut into pieces quite easily.

Load the AVI into Virtual Dub, set both audio and video to Direct Stream Copy and cut it there. No reencoding.

And if AVI isn't to be the final format, make it whatever it's to be and cut the 3 hour finished video into pieces.

[Nearyn]

I'll try that immediately. =]

-Nearyn

[hello_hello]

I'd use the VirtualDub method for cutting too, but keep in mind without re-encoding it can only cut on keyframes. There's buttons with a key image on them in the navigation bar for moving between keyframes. Mostly, that's not an issue, but keyframes can be several seconds apart (it depends on the encoder and settings used) so you mightn't always be able to cut in the exact spot you'd like to.

I asked about the audio as editing it independently from the video sounds like more work, and a recipe for frustration if you get it wrong. As you're replacing some of the audio anyway, the way you're doing it might be easiest, but normally it'd probably be better to edit the video and audio together. So you'd add your intro as you're doing now, but output an edited AVI without first cleaning the remaining audio. Then you could split it with VirtualDub. Once it's split, VirtualDub can extract the audio from each AVI and from there you can use Audacity to clean it up, then VirtualDub can replace the original AVI audio with the new version, once again using direct stream copy for audio and video.
If possible it might be an idea to output the edited AVI containing lossless audio with VSDC (ie PCM or FLAC), extract it from the AVIs, import that into Audacity and export the cleaned up version in the format you ultimately want (ie MP3) then add that to the AVI. That way, it's only be converted to a lossy format once.

Just some thoughts.... but might be easier than editing the video and audio independently while trying to ensure the edits match.