Pulling out video sections / clips

[pellouch]

My son is an avid tennis player. I have video taped his tennis matches with a camera on a stick hanging on a fence solution. His tennis matches are typically 1-2 hours long.

I would like to go through the video and cut out all the parts of the video that are not part of a point. In other words, I would like to record only the parts where points are actually occurring. From the serve to the end of the point. I would then like to concatenate all these sections of video together.

I have done this manually -- only recording the points in a match - manually hitting the record and stop button for each point, and the whole match ended up being like only 10-20 minutes. That's the kind of things I'd like to be able to do by simply chopping up the long video into small parts that are then concatenated together.

What is the easiest/best way to do this?

-phil

[videobruger]

The "best" way is to avoid re-encoding. The fastest and without loss in quality. Try Video To Video Tools -> Commercial Remover.

[smrpix]

It's easiest (and usually fastest) to do in a regular NLE such as Vegas Movie Studio. It's a little more cumbersome in free tools such as AviDemux or VirtualDub. In all cases the process is the same: mark your in and out points and non-destructively delete the parts you don't want.

Any of theses tools will have the same export options. Whether you can do it losslessly depends on the source material.

[pellouch]

I tried "Video To Video" and it works (thanks), but the interface to the commercial remover is not great. I would love to be able to move the start / stop times once I've set them. It seems like once I've removed sections, I can't change it later.

[smrpix]

I tried "Video To Video" and it works (thanks), but the interface to the commercial remover is not great. I would love to be able to move the start / stop times once I've set them. It seems like once I've removed sections, I can't change it later.

That's why the functionality of a regular NLE is worth a couple of bucks-- especially if you're going to be doing a lot of this. I'm not a sony shill, but you get a lot of power for <$40 with Sony (Vegas) Movie Studio

[pellouch]

smrpix - does that work on a mac?

[smrpix]

No. Your only choices on a mac are iMovie and FCPX. (There's also Avid | First and Lightworks, but one is limited and the other takes a while to learn.)

Always a good idea to mention Mac up front as most folks here are PC-centric. (Despite Mac's reputation, there are far more options for PC in this realm.)