Editing with DVD Flick possible ?

[sudiptoghosh]

I am using DVD Flick to join together my holiday videos & create a single DVD. While I could do most of the things I wanted, I did not find any way to edit the video to a smaller length i.e. if I would like to delete some parts of the videos before joining them together, then I could not find a way to do it. I am wondering if there is any way to do that using DVD Flick.

I also have Xilisoft's DVD Creator installed which does let edit the videos to make them shorter, but overall the tool is not that good & I would not like to use that.

[guns1inger]

DVD Flick is a one-click (kinda - nothing is truly one-click) encoding and authoring tool. What you want is an editor. As a general rule, it is best to use a dedicated tool for each step in the process. Dedicated tools, while sometimes having less overall function, generally do a better job because they are dedicated to doing one task well, instead of 7 tasks poorly. As you have seen with Xilisoft, as=nd as can also be seen in suites like Nero and Roxio, spreading your development resources too thin trying to do too much jest results in mediocrity. Of course, some people are happy with a mediocre outcome if it means only learning one tool. That's fine, just don't complain about the quality.

What's best depends on what your source files are. The simplest tools for trim editing are either Virtualdub or AVI Demux. You want to use the one that will let you trim without having to re-encode all your videos. Without knowing what format your files are, I cannot be any more specific.

[sudiptoghosh]

Thanks guns1inger, agree with you 100% on your point about dedicated tools for each job. Specially after my experience with Xilisoft. Now I am using GSpot to verify the videos, DVD Flick to put them together as a DVD Folder, used VLC player to play them back. Only after I am satisfied with the created files, then I plan to burn them with ImgBurn.

My source files are all ".avi" files (NTSC) produced by my digital camcorder (Canon). All of these are small home video clips (3 - 10 mins). I need to trim some portions out of these before I join all of these together into a single DVD. From the other threads posted looks like Virtualdub would do the job ?

Also do you see any issues with cutting/splitting & then joining the clips together on the final DVD produced ? What I mean would doing these things make the DVD more error prone & lead to skipping of tracks etc. ? My end goal is to produce a good stable DVD disk which plays without skipping etc on my DVD player. If you think editing as above may possibly make the disk unstable then I would rather avoid that. Please advise ?

[guns1inger]

Virtualdub will do this easily. You may need to install cineceda DV codec to work with the files, but if you use Direct Stream Copy mode and don't apply any filters, you can edit without re-encoding.

[sudiptoghosh]

ok, thx. I will try out Virtualdub today & use the Direct Stream Copy mode.