ALOT of Cutting for ALOT of bulk footage, any time saving ways?

[lordoftweedheads]

Hello everyone, first post here as I have a problem and was wondering if the experts and those passionate about this work would be able to steer me in the right direction of a solution?

You see I’ve been recently trying to condense and cut my 200gb of gopro videos on spearfishing. All of them contain a few little parts I want to keep and a whole lot of nothing.
Recently I spent 3 days straight trying to do it with the gopro’s cineform and a xilisoft cutter program. Cineform sometimes crashes my computer and also changes the video format so the 5minute video archive ends up being the same size as the original 1 hour video it was derived from wtf. (I don’t want to lose quality as I want to colour correct etc later)
I just want to cut the good bits out of my videos and join them into the same video of the exact same format/quality as the original.
Its not only that but it seems every video editing software out there has the same user interface, yes they are good at finding the exact points you want to cut from a FEW videos. But have forced me to take hours editing my videos.

It seems I’m doing the same repetitive work, MANUALLY selecting the times I want, MANUALLY cutting them, MANUALLY joining them. And the output is not even the same format as the original.
Computers were born to do these repetitive tasks, isn’t there a program out there that can do this from a table of written data? Just throw it into a program and let it do the work instead of me taking 3 days.

I’ve finally made up a good description of what I (and possibly everyone) really need....

I want to write up a table of data, 5 columbs, X amount of rows for X amount of clips I want
eg
No................Original video directory.................Trim in..........Trim out......................Save as whole video
1........../55spearingbridge/GOPRO0001.Mp4..........5:23..............6:44..... .................................A
2........../55spearingbridge/GOPRO0001.Mp4..........3:03..............4:12..... .................................A
3........../55spearingbridge/GOPRO0003.Mp4..........7:26..............9:01..... .................................A
4........../527Seaway/GOPRO0001.Mp4.................5:58..............8: 36......................................B
5
6

So I want to put this into a program and have it trim the files in the right places, join 1,2 and 3 together(in that order) and output it as a new file the same quality/format as the original.
I think it will be alot faster than all the similar programs out there, which are good for movie making... but not for thinning out hours of bulk footage.

Can anyone help point me in the right direction of an extremely time saving program like this?
Or would it be easy to program something? And where would I start? (MP4 format)
Thankyou so much, any help would be much appreciated.

[smrpix]

The time-consuming part is finding your ins and outs. In any decent NLE you can make your marks, join the clips on a timeline and export them. It doesn't get simpler than that.

MP4 smart rendering is is difficult and rarely shows up in software that allows you to do the other stuff efficiently. And GoPro footage can have quirky frame rates and raster sizes too.

TMPGenc Smart Renderer will do what you want, but it's not as fast or elegant as a real NLE.

[budwzr]

Try Sony Movie Studio

I edit GoPro video all the time. Easy Peasy.

[lordoftweedheads]

Thanks for the help guys ,
I’m definitely going to give sony vegas a go as a decent NLE, apparently it has nice shortcut keys while I trim using jkl to find the points and io to select them. Still it’s not quite what I wanted as it seems to blend in with all the other NLEs although I hope it will be faster, less buggy and less/easier manual input from me to get my task done alot faster.
I think I might have a unnecessary fear that is driving me to want the same output format(no recoding), which is I’m afraid I’ll lose quality and will not be able to colour correct with as greater perfection later. Is this the case?

Also was pointed towards this http://avidemux.sourceforge.net/ , haven’t tried it yet but it looks although I can do coding with it and create my own stuff thus, perhaps making my table input idea possible. Are there any other programs like this?
Thanks
Sam

[poisondeathray]

The problem with avidemux is it's not frame accurate for long GOP videos when stream copying (your cuts might be a few frames off, thus your joins might be a few frames off) . The way most consumer video is stored is in a way that doesn't code every frame individually. Some frames derive information from other frames. So you can't just cut anywhere, you need all the frames that the frame in question references data from

Smart rendering editors, re-encode the few frames around a cutsite, so they are frame accurate e.g. videoredo , tmpgenc smart renderer, solveigmm video splitter

If you re-encode (takes longer, lose quality) instead of stream copying , such as you were re-encoding with cineform, then any editor should be accurate . You can re-encode to the same h.264/mp4 format, but you will still incur generation loss

How did you figure out your cutlist in/out times in the first place ? Presumably you used something to preview figure out the times. IMO you might as well use a program that does it all at once (so you can preview / edit at the same time)

[smrpix]

Don't delete the original media, you can always use your Vegas projects to reference your selections when you are ready to color correct

[lordoftweedheads]

Thankyou very very much poisondeathray for that info, had no idea that frames where not individual so that could be a real problem.
I’ll use vegas next step I think.
Thankyou all,
Sam