Editing Drive Trip Videos

[CTPete]

I am really a Newbie to Video Editing. I have a 2K resolution SJCAM 5000x camera. One thing I want to do is record edit and post Videos of Road trips in dashcam mode. Some short and some long trips. Obviously I need to significantly shorten the footage but I don't want to spend hours or days on each video. One way is to use Video/Time Lapse and speed everything up 20 or 30 times. I can even do this in-camera. However this doesn't give the right feel of driving. I would rather record the whole few hours and then post process the files.

What I want to do seems simple. I have played with a few free editors but can't find a straightforward way to get what I want. A friend has done a hardware mod on an old camera set up which simply records 3 secs of video every one minute by sending start/stop signals via a pseudo remote-control. He then joins up all the files. This is surprisingly representative of the trip. It is not speeded up and looks like driving but reduces the play time to 5% of real-time.

Does anyone know a simple Editor in which, with a single set of commands, I can split and rejoin a large continuous file in this way? 3seconds keep - 57 secs discard, throughout the whole file. Rather than cutting and re-joining the hundreds of individual pieces? Obviously the actual keep:delay time ratio numbers would be variables. Once I have a simple template then I can do specific Trip Related editing such as adding back in particularly interesting sections or discarding particularly boring or stuck in traffic sections.

Any help and suggestions would be much appreciated.

[redwudz]

AVISynth may be the way to go, but it has a bit of a sharp learning curve.

I'm experimenting with a version of VirtualDub, which is easier to set up
and using 'decimate' to remove every other frame. You can remove more.

My video sample was directly from a 2K dashcam that outputs MOV formatted video
and the VD program is set to output near lossless Grass Valley HQX video format.
HQX should be easy to edit and this version of VD is easy to understand.

I'm no expert with this and don't really need to modify my dashcam video.
But this appears to be one method. I'm sure there are better ones.
But you might experiment a little till another member comes up with a
better method.

Link to VD thread: https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/378401-VirtualDub-fork-and-plugins?

And welcome to our forums.

[CTPete]

Thanks redwuz.

Will look at VD this evening.

Any other suggestions also welcome.