Variable Framerate to Constant Frame Rate

[jjcinema1]

Hi

I have some video clips taken on a smartphone and they are all variable framerate which is a pain to edit with. I have been reading on line and it seems that the ebst way to work with these is to turn them to constant frame rate before I put them into an editor to edit. It seems that Handbrake it the popular tool for this and I have tried this out and it seems to work well. I recently came across people using MPEG Streamclip for the same conversion and was wondering is it a better programme or would the end results be the same as handbrake?

Thanks
jjcinema1

[redwudz]

I would convert to a lossless or near lossless codec like Lagarith or Grass Valley HQX or similar and then edit, then convert back to the final format.

Editing in a lossy format like .mp4 or similar won't be easy unless you don't need any but very basic editing.
And you would still need to do your cuts for edit on the I frames whether or not you have variable framerate or
constant framerate video or re-encode at the cut points at the very least.

[jjcinema1]

@redwudz

Thanks for replying, These are some clips taken from an iphone and a android smartphone of family holiday that we have on a relatives PC transferred from the phones.He has sony vegas and upon some research we learned that these are variable frame rate clips and that would need to be converted via handbrake "rf lossless" setting to make them constant framerate so the editor has no issue with them. We managed to do this ok. we found out very quickly that vegas and the oc was very slow at editing the mp4s but again upon reading about online we came across using sd proxies for editing. so we converted all our hd source to mpeg2 to edit with (which it does flawlessly).

when we have the project complete we then we use the vegas replace feature to replace the mpeg sd clips with the Constant framerate mp4s and just render it so we are getting a render from the source files, It seems like a lot but it is working well we think but just thought I would ask on here to see if handbrake is ok for converting to constant frame rate or is their a better programme like mpeg stream clip?

or (fingers crossed" the workflow we have now is ok and we can use it in the future with phone clips)

jjcinema1

[poisondeathray]

If the audio is in sync in your editor everywhere (not just beginning and end) , then handbrake is ok

Vegas shouldn't be able to open true "rf lossless" , it (and other NLE's) don't support lossless h.264 variant. Probably you didn't have the profile set correctly in handbrake and it was actually RF1 if vegas was able to open it. RF1 is near lossless anyways and more than good enough for smartphone videos . You can probably get away with 10-16 and not see any difference in quality in the final product post editing, but the intermediate will be smaller in size, and faster to edit

If you want better/faster editing use a max GOP length of 1 (all I-frame) , and tune fastdecode

[jjcinema1]

If the audio is in sync in your editor everywhere (not just beginning and end) , then handbrake is ok

Vegas shouldn't be able to open true "rf lossless" , it (and other NLE's) don't support lossless h.264 variant. Probably you didn't have the profile set correctly in handbrake and it was actually RF1 if vegas was able to open it. RF1 is near lossless anyways and more than good enough for smartphone videos . You can probably get away with 10-16 and not see any difference in quality in the final product post editing, but the intermediate will be smaller in size, and faster to edit

If you want better/faster editing use a max GOP length of 1 (all I-frame) , and tune fastdecode

Thanks, yeah we def have the profile set to r0 lossless in handbrake. we then put these outputs in folder 1 and then convert these all to mpeg2 with another converter and call it folder 2. we import our mpeg2 folder 2 files into Vegas to do our editing as they are not as cpu intensive then when we are ready to render we use the replace feature in vegas and replace our mpeg2 files in the project time line with the folder 1 material. Vegas keeps all our effcets ect and it means we can the render from a high quality source files in folder 1.

This seems to work ok but just wondering is handbrake as good as mpeg streamclip for the framerate conversion?

[usually_quiet]

I recently came across people using MPEG Streamclip for the same conversion and was wondering is it a better programme or would the end results be the same as handbrake?

MPEG Streamclip has not been updated for OS X versions after Mountain Lion. MPEG Streamclip for Windows has not been updated since 2008, and the version of Quicktime Alternative that it requires is problematic for Windows 7 in 2016. I don't know if it does any better with actual Quicktime for Windows, but Apple has discontinued support for QuickTime for Windows. Quicktime for Windows 7.7.9, which works for Vista and Windows 7, but is not fully functional for later versions of Windows, is the final release.