What to do with 36 hours of family video footage?

[Casho]

I have about 36 hours of AVI (DV) family movie footage that was taken on an old Canon Video Camera and imported into PC many years. The footage is in 36 one hour separate files. I want to make this footage more usable by splitting each file into smaller files (eg birthdays etc) that I can integrate into my photo collection using Google Photos. I wish to maintain the original quality. The files are Type 1 AVI (DV) files. After some research, it seems that SolveigMM Video Splitter software could do this, but I don't know anything about this software. Is this the best software to use? Also, should I keep the format in Type 1 AVI (DV) format to ensure no loss of quality, or should I consider converting to another file format. I am not concerned about file size, and Google Photos will allow me to upload original files without conversion.

In the ideal world I would for the software to analyse the footage and to automatically split the files each time the recording started and stopped, as this would be much quicker than doing this manually - but I am no sure if this is possible.

I appreciate any advice, and thanks in advance.

[Cornucopia]

Keep everything as they are and just create a (series of?) playlist/cutlist/EDL files to reference those originals when necessary.

Scott

[Casho]

Keep everything as they are and just create a (series of?) playlist/cutlist/EDL files to reference those originals when necessary.

Scott

Thanks for your response but I am not sure I understand what you mean. What I want to achieve is to split each of the 1 hour files (which are about 12 GB each) into many separate files based on the family event that is covered (eg a separate file for a particular birthday). Each file currently has many several event covering several months. I want to split the 1 hour files into multiple files as this will make them more usable as I will be able to give each file a file name and will be able to integrate the files into my photo collection.

[JVRaines]

Try ScenalyzerLive.

[johnmeyer]

Almost any non-linear editor can do this. You can even do it using VirtualDub, which is free and easily available. DV AVI is really simple to split into separate segments, without changing any of the video. Because the video isn't altered, the operation is nothing more than a copy operation and therefore goes really fast. If you want to speed it up even more, put the edited video on a different physical drive than the source video, because a drive cannot read and write at the same moment in time and therefore it takes longer to read, and then write, to the same drive.

if you do use VirtualDub, the one thing you need to know is to select "Direct Stream Copy" before you proceed.