VirtualDub Speed: simple video editing

[LavaJockey]

Here is a common situation for me: I capture 2 hours of 640x480 video with Huffyuv compression. I delete commercials with VirtualDub (the Home/End/Delete keys method). Then I save the result to an AVI file. But it's SLOW: about 15 frames/second when I save to AVI. If I keep 90 minutes of the original capture, this step alone takes 3 hours, and I'm not even using any VirtualDub filters.

Is there anything I can do to make this go faster?

[HillJack]

Assuming you are willing to frameserve with VirtualDub, do your commercial cutting, setup your filter(s), then "Save Processing Settings" only. This saves a tiny text file with all the cut frames referenced, filters and their settings saved.

Then, when your ready to encode to VCD or whatnot, load the avi, load the processing settings and fire up the frameserver! Takes me about 0.0000005 seconds to save that .vcf file on my system

I do this when I cut out commercials from TVcaps myself. Works every single time.

[uteotw]

1. You could frameserve from virtualdub as suggested before , but do it if you're using a Constant Bitrate mehtod. Depending on the filter used , frameserving to encode VBR usually takes more time than first saving an AVI and then encoding to VBR.

2. You could save the editied AVI to another hard disk. You'd gain a few frames / sec.

3. You could use a different codec. I used to capture with Huffyuv as well but know I always use PicVideo MJPEG codec at quality 20. I found it to be faster for editing with Virtualdub , at quality 20 there is very few JPEG artifacts and finaly it keeps the interlaced fields which can be useful sometimes. I've found MJPEG to be 1.5 to 2 times faster than Huffyuv when editing or encoding to MPG.

Why do you capture 640x480 ? Is it you final encoding resolution ?

uteotw

[LavaJockey]

HillJack: the frameserving worked well. It did add about .4x (.4 times length of AVI to be encoded) to my TMPGEnc encoding time, but that's better than the 2x needed by VirtualDub to remove the unwanted scenes and save to disk.

uteotw: I'll try saving the edited AVI to another disk, just to see what the speed is. PicVideo MJPEG codec is out of the question. My biggest problem is that the captured AVI (from Osprey capture card) is not as good as the original video. I don't want to degrade it further with MJPEG. And that's why I capture at 640x480: better quality. I know that's way to high for VHS, but captures at that resolution definitely look better than 320x240; I'm still undecided whether or not they look better than 480x480.

I am undecided on what my final encoding resolution should be. The final destination of the video will be hard disk, not DVD or CD, so it can be whatever I choose. Currently I choose 640x480 because that looks the best.