Editing AVI/huffYUV with Premiere

[MrPeanut]

I've captured several VHS tapes as AVI using huffYUV. Some of these tapes have 5-6 clips all from one tape that were captured as several files. I'd now like to trim, combine, and save them as one final file without losing any quality.

If I understand correctly, that means I should stay in AVI/huffYUV and should not re-encode.

I have Premiere Elements 10.0 and used VirtualDub to capture and also have access to Premiere Pro CC. If there is no difference in quality, I'd prefer to use Premiere Elements to trim and combine.

Can I simply drop my files onto my timeline, trim, and export as AVI/huffYUV? Or will that degrade quality?

[manono]

If all you're doing is joining and cutting out parts,, you can just as easily do that in VDub. Add them one by one using 'Append' and then mark off and cut out the parts you don't want. Set Video for 'Direct Stream Copy' and save out the joined and edited footage. No reencoding will be done.

[MrPeanut]

Oh, even easier! Do my cuts have to be on key frames? (I read that somewhere.) And I assume Audio should also be "Direct Stream Copy"?

[Cornucopia]

All frames are keyframes when using HuffYUV encoding (it's an inter-frame only codec, aka all-keyframe). Direct Stream copy should be fine for WAV/LPCM audio streams, but I'm a little less confident regarding compressed formats such as AC-3 or MP3.
Note that there is always the possibility that your frame-based cut might land on a part of the audio waveform that isn't at the zero-amplitude (crossover) point, and if so, it'll leave a tick/glitch at those cut points.

Scott

[manono]

You can check but the audio should be set to 'Direct Stream Copy' by default. As cornucopia mentioned, at worst you might have a slight noise artifact where it's cut but you can fix that later on.

I'm assuming the audio was captured as PCM WAV audio.