Easy splitting of long videos

[DJDJDJDJ]

Hi,

I am in the process of converting some old VHS, VHS-C and DV cam videos. Probably a whole winter-long process. My process starts with connecting VCR through my DV-Cam, connecting the DV cam to PC over Firewire, and then capturing the video as DV. As you guys know, a 2 hours video results in around 60-80GB.

I am using PPro to edit and finalize the videos. Since these are home videos, each tape has a lot of footage from different days/months/events. I would like to create a separate video for each event to make it more portable and easier to watch as well.

Currently, I can put the footage on the time-line, then cut it to size and export. However, going through just one tape will take forever if is has 10-15 events and having to wait for each render. I can also put markers on the footage at locations where each event starts. Is there a way to tell PPro to create/export individual clips for each marker? Or is there a better way to manage this? Creating individual scenes seem too much work just to split videos.

By the way, the only post-processing I am doing is some crop to clean our some edges.

Thank you.

(Sorry about the long story)

[DJDJDJDJ]

Just to add a bit more information; I just got done capturing my first VHS. Resulting video has 23 different events that I need to break out. Need to find some utility that allows me to simply put marks at locations where I would like the file to be split and then split the file into parts.

Thanks

[pippas]

Capturing DV should give you file sizes of around 13GB per hour... so 30-40 GB per hour seems really high .. something odd there.

DV is intraframe, so easy to cut and save..... Open the file in Virtualdub and then select the start and end points of the section you want, press f12 and save clip as a 'direct stream copy'..... Fast and no re-encoding.

Press ctrl+Z to return to the original file and repeat for each selection...

[usually_quiet]

AVCutty, but only if someone likes it enough to buy it after trying it, since it is nagware. Some here like ScenalyzerLive for simple DV cutting, although it is old now.

[Brainiac]

When I have to do what you are wanting to do, I set the in and out points for each segment and queue each segment in the Media Encoder. Once I queue all segments, I render them. You could render a bunch of segments overnight while you sleep. The individual in and out points are remembered during encoding.

[smrpix]

Premiere Pro handles DV natively so there's no need for anything else. You already have all the capabilities you are looking for.

DV tapes captured through Premiere can automatically create new clips at scene breaks.
helpx.adobe.com/premiere-pro/using/capturing-digitizing.html

The VHS material does not have the metadata necessary so you will have to search to the scene breaks manually after capture and either add markers or subclip the files.

PPro can also output DV as DV with no rendering time required, just a straight data copy.

[DJDJDJDJ]

Thanks. I will check out Virtualdub. Can it encode as well or will I have to encode each AVI to MPEG2 manually in PPro.

[usually_quiet]

Thanks. I will check out Virtualdub. Can it encode as well or will I have to encode each AVI to MPEG2 manually in PPro.

I have seen others write about using Virtualdub as a frameserver with an Avisynth script to encode to MPEG-2 using HCEnc, but you might prefer using Premiere Pro to encode the DV AVI files to MPEG-2, since you are familiar with Premiere Pro.

Virtualdub itself uses AVI files for its output. DV AVI in to DV AVI out using "Direct Stream Copy" should be relatively fast because there is no re-encoding.

[JVRaines]

Just to add a bit more information; I just got done capturing my first VHS. Resulting video has 23 different events that I need to break out.

Are you sure that turning one tape into 23 video files will make it easier to watch and manage?

Anyway, you can automate the whole process by putting input filenames, in/out times, and output filenames in a delimited format in a text file, then reading it from a batch file and calling FFmpeg to render each section as MPEG2 or whatever coding you want.

[DJDJDJDJ]

Are you sure that turning one tape into 23 video files will make it easier to watch and manage?

Yes, I believe so. Since these are family videos, it will be much easier to find a particular event by looking at a particular file name rather than going through multiple full length videos and searching for a 5 minute footage somewhere in the middle. I use Kodi as a media player with my TV so looking for a file name would be much easier than scanning whole videos and perhaps miss that little clip multiple times.

Unless, of course, you think there is a better way to do this; I am open to suggestions.


Thank you everyone for your replies and suggestions. I will check out your recommendations and see which will work best in my workflow.