On 15/01/07, Gordon Scott <gordon@???> wrote:
> Hi Guys,
>
> I'm looking to transfer some old(!) video tapes through to DVD and
> PC-playable video clips to help with some training. I can transcribe the
> video tapes to DVD OK as I've recently bought a DVD recorder (the first
> layer of my somewhat reluctant and downright expensive migration to
> digital TV).
>
> So now I have some DVDs with the videos on them.
>
> The next job is to take those videos, tidy them up by removing some
> clutter and out-of-date information, extract specific pertinent clips
> and put the end results back onto DVDs.
>
> So the question is, what tools should I look at for doing this and just
> how do I go about it?
>
> I've been looking at and trying what feels like dozens of packages, but
> I have still to actually find a combination that works, so I'd
> appreciate some pointers.
>
> Kino looks like a reasonable choice for the editting as I need do very
> little with it, though Cinelerra-CV sounds like it should be kept in
> reserve. So far though, I haven't found anything that will let me take a
> DVD and edit it's content.
>
> Probably I'm missing something `obvious' somewhere, or possibly "The
> Tool To Use" is just not working for me (e.g., Xine worked when I first
> ran it, but some upgrade/change has, I think, broken it).
>
> What tools do you recommend I look at for this task, please, and what
> video format(s) are appropriate for the various stages?
>
> TIA.
>
> ATB,
> Gordon.
> --
I do a fair amount of video editing. This is mainly from DV tapes from
camcorders.
The .dv format is very easy to do editing with as it contains the
entire video as I-Frames. I.e. all frames are self contained, with no
prediction from previous frames. So, this makes writing a video editor
application easy.
DVD is a problem. It uses MPEG2. It uses compressions that relies of
prediction from previous frames. As such, it is considerably more
difficult to edit, because if you try to cut out one of the frames
used to predict another frame, the editor has to re-encode the stream.
Unfortunately, not many Linux editors support editing with these types
of compressed streams. Generally, editing a MPEG2 stream results is a
loss of quality on the output, due to the re-encoding requirement. DV
streams do not require any re-encoding so the quality is preserved.
As a result, I think that a possibly better solution might be to get a
video capture card for you PC, and capture the video frames from the
VCR and save them in .dv format.
You can then easily edit the stream, and then export to DVD or
whatever other format. You will have to accept that .dv streams take a
LOT of disk space up.
James
