Cinelerra, high def MPEG from TiVo, slicing out a clip, creating DVD and portable versions

[Greg Rundlett]

On Fri, Mar 27, 2009 at 9:04 AM, Jarod Wilson <jarod at wilsonet.com> wrote:
> On Friday 27 March 2009 08:36:12 Ben Scott wrote:
>> SCENARIO
>>
>>   I have a one hour, high-definition news program, recorded on my TiVo
>> Series 3.  It is roughly 8 GB in size.  I want to extract a short
>> segment from that file -- maybe 5 minutes.  Ideally, I'd do this part
>> with no loss of quality from re-encoding the compressed stream, but
>> I'm willing to take a hit if I have to.  I then want to do two things
>> with the clip: (1) Produce a DVD-Video disc which will play in most
>> typical DVD players.  (2) Produce a "portable version" which is of
>> more suitable file size, and which will play "out of the box" on most
>> MS Windows systems (and ideally other systems).  Obviously I'll take a
>> quality hit downscaling and re-encoding for these two things.
>>
>>   I have never this before.  I've never even used video editor
>> software before, nor have I made a DVD, nor have I successfully
>> re-encoded a video file.

[...]

>>   I can select start and end points, and "Save" them to a new file.
>> New file will play as before, with audio, even.  However, it seems to
>> loose the ability to move forward/backwards in the video -- players
>> either refuse the option, or crash.  mplayer output includes:
>>
>>       Badly interleaved AVI file detected - switching to -ni mode...
>>       AVI: Missing video stream!? Contact the author, it may be a bug :(
>
>
> So I presume this means avidemux transcoded the clip to an avi. I swear
> it supports simply cutting w/o having to re-encode the video, but I
> could be mistaken. To be able to make a DVD that will play in a commercial
> DVD player, you want to stick to mpeg2. Something else you might consider
> trying:
>
> http://www.gopchop.org/
>

Another tool that is useful is Handbrake http://handbrake.fr/

I used it while attempting to "slice" some video that I had recorded.
I was trying to do basically what you are doing although my source was
a consumer video recorder.  As part of that process, I had to
re-encode an avi to mp4.  My 2hr video took 9 hours to re-encode.

I previously had no idea that the audio and video could get out of
sync, and I'm still amazed at the complexity of multimedia.

fwiw, I (try to) put my observations and helpful hints here:
http://freephile.com/wiki/index.php/Video_Blogging#HandBrake
http://freephile.com/wiki/index.php/Video_Editing

~ Greg

-- 
Greg Rundlett
Web Developer - Initiative in Innovative Computing
http://iic.harvard.edu
camb 617-384-5872
nbpt 978-225-8302
m. 978-764-4424
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