Cutting and joining AVI using Vitualdub

[Scuda]

Hi,

I'm making my first attempt to edit my niece's wedding that I videotaped. I hope to burn her a DVD as a christmas present. Well, I managed to figure out how to cut out the typical "Oops, I left the camera running and got 5 minutes of floor" video using Vitualdub. I read a couple of guides on how to join them using Virtualdub and it doen't seem to be working.
I make sure that both video and audio are set to direct stream. Then I select File> Open Video, then pick the first part of the edited video. Next step was to select File->Append Video Segment. I pick the name of the first video then hit OK. Then I do the same for the second part of the edited video; opening the second edited video, then for "append" pick the name of the second video. It only kept the second video.
I also tried for the "append" for the second video, I clicked on the name of the first video, I got an error stating that the data rate of the 2 videos are different. Can someone show me the error of my ways? Thanks.

[Tommyknocker]

Use AviSynth. It does not care what what the framerates are between the videos you want to join. And it does not care how many you want to join.

[SaSi]

Perhaps avisynth doesn't care about different frame rates, but joining such clips will inevitably cause audio/video go out of sync after encoding to MPEG2.

This issue reminds me of my first days of capturing and editing video segments.

First of all, how did you obtain the video taped material in AVI format? Did you capture it (i.e. your camcorder is analog) or do you have a DV camcorder and have a DV AVI file?

It's most likely you captured the video and not all in one session (or your capture settings/program did not do a good job).

In order to ensure flawless editing and further encoding, I do the following when capturing camcorder or VHS material.

I use VirtualDUB to capture (appears a little complex at first, but once you understand how it does capture, it is a joy). I encode video with hufyuv and leave audio uncompressed. It's important to set the frame rate to 25fps (for PAL) or 29,... for NTSC and force VirtualDUB to keep the frame rate steady.

Encode the whole material in one go. Don't stop and restart capture.

You can then open the captured video with VirtualDUB, mark the beginning and end of unwanted sections (first rudimentary editing) and press delete. This marks these segments to be deleted.

To save the edited video, select a new filename and save as avi. Marking direct stream copy for both audio and video is good and fast.

You then have an edited video that containes only wanted material. To change the sequence of some parts, you need to mark them, save each one of them and then open the first and append the rest, as you do now.

This should work ok (has for me everytime).

[Scuda]

SaSi,
Thank you for your very informative response. I captured the video in one session from my analog camcorder. I'm planning on converting videotapes of the kids growing up (my son's 17 now so they are getting old) so I'll be putting your info to plenty of use. Please excuse my ignorance, but I'm doing this for the first time and I want to learn the correct way. I'm afraid I'm going to have to teach my brother who is planning on doing the same type of project. I will recapture the 1-hour of video using VirualDUB (I previously used DVD Workshop). My problem with my first attempt is probably that I did not encode it. I was not sure of what steps to follow. I have never used hufyuv, I downloaded it and had problems installing it. Do you recommend any guides to read to help with hufyuv? Again, thanks for you help