Searching for a multiple codec convertor & editor

[skalgrim]

Hello everyone,

I was looking for a recommendation. I have tried much of the s/w mentioned in the stickies, but not found exactly what I am after.

It's not complex

I want to be able to import avis / mpgs of any codec (lets say xvid, divx, vcd and so on), edit them in a linear fashion (ala premier) and then output the whole lot as a single file (probably xvid or divx).

It doesn't need to be hugely complex or have a million features. Basic is good.

And it needs to run on Vista 32bit with the latest updates

thanks all!

Skal

[guns1inger]

AVI Demux. File Open, then File Append. Saves in many formats, opens many formats.

However : Unless you want to pay for Premiere or Vegas or similar, you won't find one that opens any video. AVI Demux and virtualdub etc can all open and join many formats, but the videos generally have to have the same resolution and general properties (such as audio) for this to work. The big boys are happier to work with mismatched sources, but won't load a lot of end user compression formats like Xvid or Divx happily.

You can get around this by re-encoding individual clips to a common format, then joining them, but this means that some of your clips will be several generations of compression old, and will start to look pretty average.

The only other product you might try is Ulead VideoStudio, but you will still run into problems with some formats.

Very few formats are are built for editing or are more than end user compression formats. Things like flv, Xvid, mpeg-1 and even mpeg-2 (unless the bitrate is very high) are designed for playback only, and should be the last thing done to a video. Because of this, they are difficult to work with for other purposes and suffer heavy generational loss from re-encoding.

[skalgrim]

Thanks, I just tried AVI Demux on my current files and it worked very well - they had the same resolution, audio rate and filetype, so thats good.

Perhaps then you could recommend a quick and easy file convertor for when I need to set the files up beforehand? I was using a nice shareware one which no longer runs on vista (Im a recent convert)

many thanks