Cutting out commercials...

[ebrae]

Hi everyone!!!

Okay, all the video editing programs I am finding all seem to talk about how they will join clips together. That is great, but I am looking for an easy to use program that will allow me to open the video file (mostly mpeg-2) and select chunks of the video on a timeline that I want to cut out, before I use TMPGEnc to encode as VCD or SVCD.

I just bought a Winfast TV2000 XP Deluxe capture card and want to set the timer to capture a show when I am out, then take out the commercials and make a VCD or SVCD.

I do have Premiere 6.0 and Ulead Media Studio Pro 6. Will one of these accomplish this easily? Any other easier to use programs for this?

Thanks in advance!!!

www.robj.ca

[Poplar]

Since what you want to do is mostly cutting, I don't think Premiere or Ulead Media Studio Pro is the way to go, as they are designed to do other stuffs. M2-Edit Pro is probably better, if you can get it. There are some other simple and fast cutting and merging tools, but they are not very good at precise cutting.

[solarfox]

On the contrary -- if you already have ULead Media Studio Pro, you have exactly what you need for this kind of thing. In fact, if you have this, you may not even need TMPGenc at all (unless you want to make use of particular video filters or 2-pass VBR encoding which ULead MSP doesn't have), since MSP already has VCD and SVCD templates to produce compliant MPEG streams.

One of the tools in the ULead MSP timeline window is the "scissors" -- locate the starting and ending points of your unwanted commercials (having your timeline's zoom set to 5 or 10 seconds, with the display in filmstrip mode, is good for this), and click on these points in the timeline with the scissor tool. This will "cut" the original video clip into smaller clips at the point you select. You can then delete the commercial portion, and (if necessary) zoom down to single-frame resolution to make the edit more precise by snipping out any stray frames you might have missed.

Then, if you want to be really fancy, drag the beginning of the next program segment down to the "B" timeline so it overlaps the end of the previous one by a second or two, use the crossfade-audio tool to crossfade the sound, and apply a nice fade or wipe transition to the video tracks.