Joining 2 mpgs

[armyofquad]

All I want to do is join 2 mpgs and have it be seemless. Should be simple.

It isn't!

First problem - first mpg has a blank frame at the end, 2nd a blank at the start. They need to be removed.

Second problem - Sony Vegas has an annoying habit of not previewing and outputting the same thing.

Literally - I lay out the videos exactly as I want them.
I render them to the same settings as the original video.
I import the rendered video on another track in the same project.
At some point before the end of the first segment, frames stop matching exactly between the project, and what it rendered.

IT SHOULD BE ILLEGAL TO CALL ANY SOFTWARE THAT DOES THIS PROFESSIONAL!

If my render doesn't match exactly the original project, JUST WHAT IN THE HECK IS THE SOFTWARE DOING? BECAUSE IT CERTAINLY ISN'T DOING WHAT I SET IT TO DO!

Because of the software completely disregarding my project and my settings, and coming up with frames from who the hell knows where, by the time it gets to the transition between the 2 videos, it's inserting a blank frame there.

I'm so sick and tired of going to a lot of effort to do a simple task, and having every effort thwarted by awful programming. It's sad that no one has ever programmed any software that works with video that actually works properly - I always have to trick the software into doing what I want it to do.



Anyone have any suggestions on a better process to join these files and remove the blank frames?

[Skiller]

first mpg has a blank frame at the end, 2nd a blank at the start. They need to be removed.

You want to use Cuttermaran then. It can do exactly that and it'll re-encode only the frames around GOP boundaries that need it.

You first need to demux program or transport streams (MPG, MPEG, TS, etc.) because Cuttermaran works with elementary streams (separate video and audio files).

[armyofquad]

Ok - since I'm not dealing with silent videos, that's a bit frustrating that the tool only does half the job. Not to mention the pain in the ass it will be to edit the ac3 stream that's in the file - probably will involve re-encoding that. What a pain just to get rid of a few frames, I don't understand why no such thing as a decent video editing tool exists.

[armyofquad]

My god, this app is a bigger piece of crap than anything else I've used today, all it does is open a video with no sound and show me frames - no settings, no exporting, no saving, no nothing. What in the hell am I supposed to do with this?


Why is it in all my years using this forum, to this day no one has ever been able to come up with a way to properly join 2 videos together seamlessly? I find it odd that on a forum called video help, no one knows of any method to possibly do this that consistently works!

[poisondeathray]

What kind of mpg's ? mpeg2 video ?

Try Videoredo . Very good, reliable

[armyofquad]

DVD mpg. Basically, someone converted a laserdisc to dvd. Which means joining 2 halves of a 2 sided disc. What I would have done would have been to render both captures to a single mpg and properly edited the two halves together. What the person did that made this was to just render each half itself, and author the DVD to automatically play from the first portion to the 2nd, resulting in a clunky break. So now, as usual, I have to fix everyone else's half-assed work, using half-assed tools. It's getting to the point that it may be easier for me to track down a laserdisc player and a laserdisc of the movie to make my own transfer, since nothing likes to edit mpg properly.

[armyofquad]

Video redo has no navigation - I can advance 30 seconds. I can advance one frame. I can't zoom in or move around on the time frame easily. I can't even put in a specific time. How in the heck can anyone find any editing point with the ridiculous navigation of video redo. Absolutely useless for editing of any kind. I wouldn't pay a dime for this, let alone nearly $100.

[Cornucopia]

I find it odd, that in your 5+ years here, that you haven't encountered LONG GOP and/or OPEN GOP files which would commonly cause problems like you have been experiencing...in most any app.

Your choice when working with those kinds of files (whether outgoing or incoming, or both) is to either
A. Cut on GOP I frame boundaries only and accept things not being timed optimally
B. Cut on any boundary using non-smart-rendering apps and accept that the result is 1 generation down in quality
C. Cut on any boundary using smart-rendering apps (if supported by filetype) and accept that parts of the result MAY be 1 generation down in quality

Add to that the very real possibility that your sources may not have been cut properly already, and while those bad cuts might not be so evident on simple playback, they become very evident when being processed or edited. As you seem to be experiencing, improperly referenced frames can appear inserted, or skip/delete, or be corrupted. Perhaps you need to look more closely at your sources. It is NOT a fault of these editing apps themselves.

A better understanding of modern compression and frame structures would help you more competently accommodate odd projects or perhaps prevent them from being difficult. It's not random, nor magic, nor mal intent. Just science. So learn the science.


Scott

[armyofquad]

video redo does let you put in a specific time by double clicking on the time. Not ideal, still a very clunky and barely usable method of transport. But, at least now I can try to use it to cut the 2 blank frames.

First time I select them, it gets wonky on me, but lets me save a file. The file I save, doesn't act wonky when I open that one, and has a single black frame. So I set it to cut that one out, save that, and now I have a video that shows zero black frames when I bring it into video redo, but when I play it, it still flashes black between the frames.

Once again, forum full of so called video experts, and not a single consistent working method to combine two files seamlessly and edit out any black frames!

[armyofquad]

Ok - if the problem is the files, which suggests just about every commercial DVD is manufactured improperly (granted, in this case it's not a commercial DVD, but I've tried to do many things involving editing ripped commercial dvds, and I ALWAYS run into these problems)

Here's another question I know I've asked many times.

What is a consistent way to take a problem file, and turn it into a good file, that I can then consistently edit.

And then, what is that best consistent method to edit?

[Cornucopia]

Let me guess...you are working with "converted" mpgs from the dvd, rather than using the original vob structure and using tools that understand that kind of structure.

Scott

[armyofquad]

I've tried various methods of extracting the mpgs from the DVD. Currently I'm using an extraction I used dvdvob2mpg to extract.

Initially I used it to extract the 2 sets of vob files to 2 mpgs, that's when the plan was to re-render in vegas to a single mpg. But Vegas keeps playing fast and loose with the frames, as it has just about always done for me. Sometimes I can trick Vegas into a good render by saving the project, closing the app, deleting all the files that are created by the session, reopen the project, let it reimport the files and create those informational files again, poke around the frames as little as possible to check the edit points, and render.

That strategy has not offered me any luck today.

Then I tried using mpg editing apps to trim the black frames, and then join them into an mkv file. glitches and problems every time. Not surprised - it's what I expected, and is why I didn't start with that method.

But now that we're onto tools that clip segments, I went back to dvdvob2mpg and extracted both sets of vob files into a single mpg, so I have a single file that I just need to clip those frames out of. But that strategy has also been failing.

I also played around with using makemkv, and then demuxing the mkv. That hasn't helped much.

It's not that I'm trying to do bad methods, I'm trying everything that's been suggested, googled all over the place, and am trying to find stable, consistent, working methods. But nothing seems to work consistently.

[davexnet]

Can you post a sample? SInce you now have a single mpg file with the black frames in the middle somewhere,
can you clip out a section that starts (approx) 15 seconds before and up to 15 seconds after the black frames

You can use Avidemux to copy it out

[armyofquad]

As luck would have it, the movie I'm trying to fix for my media server is Frank Zappa's 200 Motels, and the laserdisc layer break would happen to land in the middle of a scene that involves nudity, which posting samples of would probably violate policies here I'm guessing.

I've tried playing around with Avidemux - haven't been able to get it to do anything useful for this.

I just want to remove 3 blank frames - why can no one come up with any working method to remove 3 damn frames?

[poisondeathray]

It could be a bad rip, maybe a buggy source with errors

Did you try videoredo's quickstream fix ?

Sony Vegas has an annoying habit of not previewing and outputting the same thing.

Literally - I lay out the videos exactly as I want them.
I render them to the same settings as the original video.
I import the rendered video on another track in the same project.
At some point before the end of the first segment, frames stop matching exactly between the project, and what it rendered.

Because of the software completely disregarding my project and my settings, and coming up with frames from who the hell knows where, by the time it gets to the transition between the 2 videos, it's inserting a blank frame there.

At what point does mismatch start? Near the end or somewhere way before ? How much offset ? Just 1 frame ? You wrote frames (with an s) . If it inserts a single blank frame only, then that's not compensatory for multiple frame(s) .

The other semi common cause in vegas for this type of behaviour is GPU acceleration with some effects, transitions, also GPU rendering. Try disabling all

video redo

So I set it to cut that one out, save that, and now I have a video that shows zero black frames when I bring it into video redo, but when I play it, it still flashes black between the frames.

Play in videoredo, or video player, or how do you "play it" ?

It might be one field of the frame in question is black , but the other field is "ok". But the reverse for the 2nd file.

Most video apps will show only 1 field for interlaced video for preview by default - ie. Single field deinterlacing for the preview. So it looks ok in vegas, videoredo, xyz app etc... in the default preview - but you miss the defect because you're only looking at 1/2 the fields. But many video players should be showing you both fields, so you will see a flash of black

If you put the video on a 59.94p timeline in vegas or other NLE if "NTSC" (or 50p timeline if "PAL"), and the black frames are an odd number - that is your answer. 1 field of black. If you have an even number, it's something else . You can't "remove" 1/2 a frame or a single field. You'd have to do more fancy editing aligning the last field of the 1st with the 1st real field of the 2nd

[armyofquad]

I've given up on Vegas at this point, but the drift occurred about 17 minutes in. May have been a frame or 2, it was getting difficult to figure it out going through frame by frame. Vegas has always been screwy with frames in my experience, likes to randomly throw in wrong frames - does this for just about every project I have ever tried to do on it.

I did try previewing in 59.94 in the timeline to make sure both fields have content, and then set it back. That was all set. Of course - this became a moot point once Vegas decided to get loosy goosy with the frames and just throw in whatever it felt like.

Not sure what video redo was trying to do though.

I'm still completely amazed that not a single person in the video editing world has yet to come up with a way to remove 3 frames from a video file. If someone asked me to remove 3 samples from a wav, I'd have that done no problem. I mean, really, I don't care how many steps at this point, I've spent a day on these 3 frames, uncompress it to a higher format if that's what needs to be done for me to have something I can edit consistently and re-render to an equal quality mpg. I've clearly laid out here I don't mind a full re-rendering. But no tools I've tried give me any useful options...please, for the love of god, just come up with a method to remove these 3 damn frames from my file...

[armyofquad]

Tried turning off GPU acceleration in Vegas. Closed and reopened it as it instructed me to apply the changed. Imported the mpg - and the preview is an absolute mess - skipping frames around all over the place at the break, to the point that the black frames don't even preview consecutively. Jumping all over.

Vegas really is trash!

[armyofquad]

Ok - finally seem to have gotten something.

While addressing most of the things in your response, I forgot about the first one - the quickstream fix.

Tried the quickstream fix, opened the new file in video redo, and it showed me one black frame to remove. Removed it, and I still got a blink.

Brought that into Vegas - Vegas showed the last frame before the transition as having a picture in the timeline, but black on the preview - guess that one has a blank field that previews blank in vegas, but doesn't preview blank in video redo.

Went back to the fixed file in video redo, and had it remove 2 frames, now I finally have an mpg with no blink in the middle of a scene.

Once again - poison death ray saves the day.

Whew.....guess I finally have a tool to stabilize things a bit. Thanks.

[Skiller]

Seriously, you are complaining that you need to demux your video to cut it in Cuttermaran? That's like one of the most basic tasks when dealing with video.
Cuttermaran is a great piece of software that enabled me to cut my DVB-S recordings during the past ~15 years fast and efficiently without re-encoding (only where needed). Maybe the GUI is not the best but it does the job. And it does handle audio such as AC3. You just gotta RTFM.

[lollo]

Cuttermaran is a great piece of software that enabled me to cut my DVB-S recordings during the past ~15 years fast and efficiently without re-encoding (only where needed).

Bacl to old days of PVAStrumento (or Project-X) and Cuttermaran! Two excellent pieces of sotware, I also used for 15 years on pva files!

[armyofquad]

Basic or not, video redo did it without needing to demux. And although I rather dislike video redo's clunky navigation, at least I was able to find a way to make it work - I still can't for the life of me figure out how to make cutterman cut or output anything, navigation is a complete mess. Cutterman is a hard pass for me, but thanks for the suggestion.