Removing commercials from Videos

[jayant]

Removing commercials from Videos
I have been burning music video VCDs, using a Pentium IV PC with 1024 MB RAM, an ATI AIW Radeon 8500 DV Card, MMC 7 software and TMPEG Encoder for converting files captured in AVI format into mpeg for making my VCDs.
Now I have acquired a Sony DVD RW DRU 540A along with which I have got the NeroVision 3 package for capturing, editing and burning DVDs. I have made a few DVDs by starting a new video mpeg starting from the end of each commercial from the VCR recording of serials like “Sex & the City” from TV channels or home videos recorded with an analogue video camera. The DVDs play fine with my Pioneer standalone DVD Player.
But now I want to record a full length movie removing the commercials interspersed every 10 minutes during the movie. I have tried the NVE’s edit facility but it removes successfully only those commercials which are in the beginning or the end of the 2 hour recording on a VCR. Removal of any intermediate commercial results in cutting out the entire video from the beginning to the the end of the last commercial. Or I get an error message saying to the effect “you are cutting too large a section of the video for the remainder to be useful”. But Nero claims in its literature on NVE 3 that commercials can be edited out of any video using NVE-3.
Could any experienced NVE User advise me how to edit the commercials in a movie, one by one, with NeroVision Express –3?
Thanks.

P. Jayant

[dunamis]

Although I have Nero and love it for many functions, it is not the best software for what you are trying to do. I have tried numerous different software packages for this specific purpose and while many of them work well, I believe that the simplest and easiest to use is ULead Video Studio. You can download a trial version of it to play with it and see if you like it. I use this myself all the time now and then burn the DVD with Nero. I hope you find this helpful.

[tweedledee]

I have used Womble or virtual dub to remove commercials. Have you looked at these?

http://www.womble.com/products.htm

[wwjd]

VS8 is a good app for editing and manually removing commercials when the video is in avi. Another faster method is to use CCE Basic. This app encodes avi to compliant mpegs. It does it very fast and produces very good mpeg video. With CCE Basic you have the ability to quickly choose just what part of the video you want to encode. Hence, I encode the non commercial stuff. I then drop the compliant mpegs into VS8 or TDA, make a menu and burn the DVD.

CCE Basic costs $58 and TDA 1.5 costs $57.

I have NVE but stopped using it because the mpeg encoder is not very good and because it re-encodes no matter whether the mpeg is compliant or not.

wwjd

[wwjd]

jayant,

I have removed commercials from about 100 or so recorded shows and from experience I can safely say that commercials are NOT evenly distributed through out a show. The time between commercials will vary widely from one segment to another. How they transition from show to commercial will also vary a great deal. It is a manaul process, no way around it.

There are some apps out there like comskip but they are bundled with things like BeyondTV and VideoReDo. They can help find commercials but are very fallible, in the end you have to find the start and end of each commercial. You can either eliminate the commercial or you can put in a chapter point so that you just have to hit the 'Next' button on your DVD remote to skip the commercial. I personally prefer removing the commercial. You can insert chapter points with TDA and VS8.

One word of caution and that is that if you decide to insert transitions, like a short fade out and in where the commercial was removed, be sure to check the audio sync before burning. I am not saying it can not be done but I have run into audio sync issues.

wwjd

[celtic_druid]

If you are capturing to avi and converting I would suggest frameserving with AVISynth and using the trim() function.

[falco]

Mpeg Video wizard has to be the BEST for editing out commercials, from VOBs, or mpeg.
Shame about the price though.

[edDV]

I also use Ulead Video Studio 8 for this purpose on MPeg1, Mpeg2 and DV TV captures. I use the following Keyboard commands in the "Multi-Trim" feature with a 10-14 frame jump interval.

F3 mark in
F4 mark out
F5 skip n frames forward
F6 skip n frames back

Space Bar (or Ctl-P) for pause

With multi trim you mark all the commercials and then let it recompress in one pass. It would be nice to have that search for black frame feature.

[jimmalenko]

If you are capturing to avi and converting I would suggest frameserving with AVISynth and using the trim() function.

I'll 2nd this - edit in virtualdubmod and it will take care of the trim commands for you.