How do you delete or trim out the exact frame from movies?

[johnharlin]

I am trying to trim or delete the beginning of some movies and am having trouble trimming out or splitting/deleting the exact frame. I have used the trim function with AVIdemux 2.5 and also the delete/split and trim function with AVS Video Remaker and nothing will edit out the exact frame only what seems to be some kind of key frame several seconds away which ends up making no sense especially because it catches the audio in the middle of the sentence. Is there any way or program that can trim out or delete the exact frame?

[redwudz]

That's one way some codecs achieve high compression, spacing the keyframes (I frames) further apart. Divx has a default keyframe spacing of 300 frames. In between are just partial frames. That makes frame accurate editing very difficult. Most editors will want you to cut on a keyframe to eliminate sync and video breakup problems. It's a problem with the codec, not the video editor.
Some editors like VirtualDub have a 'Smart render' setting that will encode just around the cut and usually fix the problem. But VD is limited on which codecs it can use.

Or alternatively, you can encode to a lossless or near lossless format and do your editing in that, then re-encode to the desired format. Highly compressed formats were never designed for editing, just playback. The downside with a lossless codec is huge files, several gigabytes or much more. Lagarith or HuffyUV are a couple of popular lossless codecs. You would need lots of hard drive space.

The advantage with lossless codecs is you can re-encode the file with very little quality loss.

What format/codec is that movie file using?

[johnharlin]

Thank you, I'm not home now but I am 90 percent sure that the compression format is XVID.