Video editing
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Not a programming question… but I am intrigued by video editing, and why it takes so long to perform simple tasks, such as chopping bits out (beginning, middle or end), or creating a new video by stitching together one or more existing ones. I can get a 5 minute video, chop 30 seconds off the end in a video editor, and it’ll take 20 minutes to recompile the new video... wtf is it doing all that time? This is using either Freemake or the AVS video editor. And god help me if I’m playing with longer videos of an hour or more. They can take all night to recompile… (Usually mp4’s) I can sort of see why there are problems to overcome by chopping bits out the middle, but just taking some off the end... why does the whole thing need recompiling for that? Professionals can’t possibly have to put up with this. There must be faster ways of editing videos. IS it just that free or cheap software is lousy, or what? Is there some decent, not stupidly expensive, video editing software out there can do these jobs in a more reasonable amount of time?
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Not a programming question… but I am intrigued by video editing, and why it takes so long to perform simple tasks, such as chopping bits out (beginning, middle or end), or creating a new video by stitching together one or more existing ones. I can get a 5 minute video, chop 30 seconds off the end in a video editor, and it’ll take 20 minutes to recompile the new video... wtf is it doing all that time? This is using either Freemake or the AVS video editor. And god help me if I’m playing with longer videos of an hour or more. They can take all night to recompile… (Usually mp4’s) I can sort of see why there are problems to overcome by chopping bits out the middle, but just taking some off the end... why does the whole thing need recompiling for that? Professionals can’t possibly have to put up with this. There must be faster ways of editing videos. IS it just that free or cheap software is lousy, or what? Is there some decent, not stupidly expensive, video editing software out there can do these jobs in a more reasonable amount of time?
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Cr@ppy programming. Pro systems are lightning fast, as their internal format is more suitable [than mp4] for any edits.
... such stuff as dreams are made on
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Not a programming question… but I am intrigued by video editing, and why it takes so long to perform simple tasks, such as chopping bits out (beginning, middle or end), or creating a new video by stitching together one or more existing ones. I can get a 5 minute video, chop 30 seconds off the end in a video editor, and it’ll take 20 minutes to recompile the new video... wtf is it doing all that time? This is using either Freemake or the AVS video editor. And god help me if I’m playing with longer videos of an hour or more. They can take all night to recompile… (Usually mp4’s) I can sort of see why there are problems to overcome by chopping bits out the middle, but just taking some off the end... why does the whole thing need recompiling for that? Professionals can’t possibly have to put up with this. There must be faster ways of editing videos. IS it just that free or cheap software is lousy, or what? Is there some decent, not stupidly expensive, video editing software out there can do these jobs in a more reasonable amount of time?
A_Griffin wrote:
why it takes so long to perform simple tasks
I like to make short videos to explain things -- though I'm not very good at it. I have had those issues in the past. I finally found a reasonably priced software that does screen capture, and imports exports video of all type and allows me to very quickly create a screen grab video and create a GIF of it. It's very nice. It does a whole list of formats (MP4, etc) and compression levels etc. Very nice. Movavi Screen Capture & Video Editor 8 Personal Edition $49.95[^] Comparative software like Camtasia is $300. And I think this is easier to use than Camtasia. Also, I think the slowness you've experienced is because it is 1. literally converting data to another format (your final output) - it has to convert at the byte-level 2. video is large amount of data (obviously) 3. could be a slow computer too and low amount of ram -- my 8GB i7 with SSD does okay with 30 minute videos. more ram probably allows data to convert in memory instead of page to disk so much -- and if you're paging to disk, hopefully you have a SSD. Good luck.
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Not a programming question… but I am intrigued by video editing, and why it takes so long to perform simple tasks, such as chopping bits out (beginning, middle or end), or creating a new video by stitching together one or more existing ones. I can get a 5 minute video, chop 30 seconds off the end in a video editor, and it’ll take 20 minutes to recompile the new video... wtf is it doing all that time? This is using either Freemake or the AVS video editor. And god help me if I’m playing with longer videos of an hour or more. They can take all night to recompile… (Usually mp4’s) I can sort of see why there are problems to overcome by chopping bits out the middle, but just taking some off the end... why does the whole thing need recompiling for that? Professionals can’t possibly have to put up with this. There must be faster ways of editing videos. IS it just that free or cheap software is lousy, or what? Is there some decent, not stupidly expensive, video editing software out there can do these jobs in a more reasonable amount of time?
Most formats don't store a series of standalone images - uncompressed data like that is ENORMOUS. Instead, a complete frame is stored followed by a series of frames consisting of deltas from the preceding frame. The combination is used to generate the series of standalone frames you see. If you do any sort of changes, the entire series of frame + deltas, frame + deltas needs to be regenerated from the new first standalone frame (the new standalone frame probably was one of the deltas from the previous standalone frame). I believe there's also internal navigation data stored both before and after the video data in most formats.
'PLAN' is NOT one of those four-letter words.
'When money talks, nobody listens to the customer anymore.' -
A_Griffin wrote:
why it takes so long to perform simple tasks
I like to make short videos to explain things -- though I'm not very good at it. I have had those issues in the past. I finally found a reasonably priced software that does screen capture, and imports exports video of all type and allows me to very quickly create a screen grab video and create a GIF of it. It's very nice. It does a whole list of formats (MP4, etc) and compression levels etc. Very nice. Movavi Screen Capture & Video Editor 8 Personal Edition $49.95[^] Comparative software like Camtasia is $300. And I think this is easier to use than Camtasia. Also, I think the slowness you've experienced is because it is 1. literally converting data to another format (your final output) - it has to convert at the byte-level 2. video is large amount of data (obviously) 3. could be a slow computer too and low amount of ram -- my 8GB i7 with SSD does okay with 30 minute videos. more ram probably allows data to convert in memory instead of page to disk so much -- and if you're paging to disk, hopefully you have a SSD. Good luck.
I can see that converting from one format to another may take time, but I'm really talking about simply playing around with videos of the same format - usually mp4 - chopping bits out, and stringing them together. I'll give the Movavi Video Editor a try, if I can figure out from their website if they offer a free trial.... ("Download for free"... FFS... of course I can download it for free, numpkin, but can I use it for free?!)
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Most formats don't store a series of standalone images - uncompressed data like that is ENORMOUS. Instead, a complete frame is stored followed by a series of frames consisting of deltas from the preceding frame. The combination is used to generate the series of standalone frames you see. If you do any sort of changes, the entire series of frame + deltas, frame + deltas needs to be regenerated from the new first standalone frame (the new standalone frame probably was one of the deltas from the previous standalone frame). I believe there's also internal navigation data stored both before and after the video data in most formats.
'PLAN' is NOT one of those four-letter words.
'When money talks, nobody listens to the customer anymore.'Yes, that makes sense and can explain why chopping bits off the middle or beginning can force a complete recompile./ But if I'm only chopping a few seconds off the END of a video, surely it should be ale to cope wit that without recompiling the whole thing over again from the start?
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I can see that converting from one format to another may take time, but I'm really talking about simply playing around with videos of the same format - usually mp4 - chopping bits out, and stringing them together. I'll give the Movavi Video Editor a try, if I can figure out from their website if they offer a free trial.... ("Download for free"... FFS... of course I can download it for free, numpkin, but can I use it for free?!)
A_Griffin wrote:
but can I use it for free
Yes, in the past it gave a 30-day free trial. And, yes, clipping bits out is very easy and fast. I recently grabbed a video. Wanted the begin and ends trimmed off so I could just have the short middle part as a gif. Click where I want to split the video. Delete everything before that. Click where I want to split the video again. Delete everything after that. Then export to GIF. Easy.
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Not a programming question… but I am intrigued by video editing, and why it takes so long to perform simple tasks, such as chopping bits out (beginning, middle or end), or creating a new video by stitching together one or more existing ones. I can get a 5 minute video, chop 30 seconds off the end in a video editor, and it’ll take 20 minutes to recompile the new video... wtf is it doing all that time? This is using either Freemake or the AVS video editor. And god help me if I’m playing with longer videos of an hour or more. They can take all night to recompile… (Usually mp4’s) I can sort of see why there are problems to overcome by chopping bits out the middle, but just taking some off the end... why does the whole thing need recompiling for that? Professionals can’t possibly have to put up with this. There must be faster ways of editing videos. IS it just that free or cheap software is lousy, or what? Is there some decent, not stupidly expensive, video editing software out there can do these jobs in a more reasonable amount of time?
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So converting to any of the standard "Windows" video formats won't help? AM I stuck with having to put up with wasting hours of computer time, given that I'm not about to spend a fortune on pro equipment?
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I bought Sony's Movie Studio Platinum some years ago. I am very satisfied with it. Well worth the price!
Get me coffee and no one gets hurt!
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Not a programming question… but I am intrigued by video editing, and why it takes so long to perform simple tasks, such as chopping bits out (beginning, middle or end), or creating a new video by stitching together one or more existing ones. I can get a 5 minute video, chop 30 seconds off the end in a video editor, and it’ll take 20 minutes to recompile the new video... wtf is it doing all that time? This is using either Freemake or the AVS video editor. And god help me if I’m playing with longer videos of an hour or more. They can take all night to recompile… (Usually mp4’s) I can sort of see why there are problems to overcome by chopping bits out the middle, but just taking some off the end... why does the whole thing need recompiling for that? Professionals can’t possibly have to put up with this. There must be faster ways of editing videos. IS it just that free or cheap software is lousy, or what? Is there some decent, not stupidly expensive, video editing software out there can do these jobs in a more reasonable amount of time?
I think it has to do with the nature of the MP4 video format. It results in extremely high levels of compression and that requires processing the entire video to achieve. Other formats do not compress as much and don't need to evaluate the complete video. They are probably not as lossy either, if at all. Formats used for intermediate storage, before the final version, need to be as lossless as possible to retain quality.
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I think it has to do with the nature of the MP4 video format. It results in extremely high levels of compression and that requires processing the entire video to achieve. Other formats do not compress as much and don't need to evaluate the complete video. They are probably not as lossy either, if at all. Formats used for intermediate storage, before the final version, need to be as lossless as possible to retain quality.
SO would I do better to convert to another format before editing? And if so, what - given that I want to be able to play the final result on a PC? I guess what I'm trying to find out is what the best format and software is for video editing on a PC? Given that a) I don't want to spend a fortune and b) by "best" a key metric is speed...
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A_Griffin wrote:
but can I use it for free
Yes, in the past it gave a 30-day free trial. And, yes, clipping bits out is very easy and fast. I recently grabbed a video. Wanted the begin and ends trimmed off so I could just have the short middle part as a gif. Click where I want to split the video. Delete everything before that. Click where I want to split the video again. Delete everything after that. Then export to GIF. Easy.
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Not a programming question… but I am intrigued by video editing, and why it takes so long to perform simple tasks, such as chopping bits out (beginning, middle or end), or creating a new video by stitching together one or more existing ones. I can get a 5 minute video, chop 30 seconds off the end in a video editor, and it’ll take 20 minutes to recompile the new video... wtf is it doing all that time? This is using either Freemake or the AVS video editor. And god help me if I’m playing with longer videos of an hour or more. They can take all night to recompile… (Usually mp4’s) I can sort of see why there are problems to overcome by chopping bits out the middle, but just taking some off the end... why does the whole thing need recompiling for that? Professionals can’t possibly have to put up with this. There must be faster ways of editing videos. IS it just that free or cheap software is lousy, or what? Is there some decent, not stupidly expensive, video editing software out there can do these jobs in a more reasonable amount of time?
Avoid Corel Video Studio - it's nice to use, but slower than a stunned slug on Mogadons. Avidemux[^] can handle cut and stitch jobs pretty well, provided they are the same size, frame rate, and similar data rate. The interface is poor, but it's effective - particularly if it can copy the video and audio streams instead of re-encoding them. It's well worth checking if your video card supports CUDA - many video apps can use it to offload the donkey work from the processor to massively parallel GPU, and that can save significant time.
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay... AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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Avoid Corel Video Studio - it's nice to use, but slower than a stunned slug on Mogadons. Avidemux[^] can handle cut and stitch jobs pretty well, provided they are the same size, frame rate, and similar data rate. The interface is poor, but it's effective - particularly if it can copy the video and audio streams instead of re-encoding them. It's well worth checking if your video card supports CUDA - many video apps can use it to offload the donkey work from the processor to massively parallel GPU, and that can save significant time.
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay... AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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Yes, that makes sense and can explain why chopping bits off the middle or beginning can force a complete recompile./ But if I'm only chopping a few seconds off the END of a video, surely it should be ale to cope wit that without recompiling the whole thing over again from the start?
The prediction is usually bidirectional (combining frames from the past and frames from the future). So it's not necessarily as simple as dropping the end, earlier frames might have needed the end. It is of course possible to only re-compress the frames actually affected that way.. but software sucks. All of it. It's a law of nature.
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Avoid Corel Video Studio - it's nice to use, but slower than a stunned slug on Mogadons. Avidemux[^] can handle cut and stitch jobs pretty well, provided they are the same size, frame rate, and similar data rate. The interface is poor, but it's effective - particularly if it can copy the video and audio streams instead of re-encoding them. It's well worth checking if your video card supports CUDA - many video apps can use it to offload the donkey work from the processor to massively parallel GPU, and that can save significant time.
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay... AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
Another vote for Avidemux. It has a very clunky interface, but for trimming, joining and/or splitting videos it's quite excellent.
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A_Griffin wrote:
Found it - they offer a 7 day free trial.
:thumbsup: I remember now. I tried it out and liked it so much I bought it. You can add call-outs (text and other) quite easily but it is odd how you drop the item on the "track" but then edit it up on the screen after selecting it. That part was difficult to get going at first -- because I didn't know how it all worked but I like how fast you can make a video output to target format and be done.
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Most formats don't store a series of standalone images - uncompressed data like that is ENORMOUS. Instead, a complete frame is stored followed by a series of frames consisting of deltas from the preceding frame. The combination is used to generate the series of standalone frames you see. If you do any sort of changes, the entire series of frame + deltas, frame + deltas needs to be regenerated from the new first standalone frame (the new standalone frame probably was one of the deltas from the previous standalone frame). I believe there's also internal navigation data stored both before and after the video data in most formats.
'PLAN' is NOT one of those four-letter words.
'When money talks, nobody listens to the customer anymore.'
