Video editing advice?

[JimmyRiddle]

Hi

I am using my time at home to get some jobs done I've been putting off, and one is archiving a lot of the old family photos and movies onto a NAS drive so Mrs can view through a SmartTV.

I have been using Handbrake for converting some realy old  .AVI files and that is fine, but now I've just got to the point when we got a digital JVC camcorder and now got hundreds of little .MOV files!

If I convert these to .MKV can anyone please advise on the best, and ideally free, way of stitching these together to make single files covering say 30-40mins?

I do not need anything fancy.

Using a Windows 10 laptop.

Cheers in advance, J

 

[ErnestTurnip]

I think summat like FFMPEG will do it but I've not used it or anything like it for years and years.

[Carlos]

You can do this on Windows 10 if you run the Photos programme there's a video editor built in where you can drag and drop them. This is quick and dirty.

I tend to use Adobe Premier Rush, which costs £9.98 a month (can cancel after 1 month), really easy to make a video, add text, smooth transformations, adjust volume etc.

[JimmyRiddle]

Cheers, will check it out.

I mistake, they are .MOD extensions if that makes a difference?

Also any idea how to keep the meta data when you convert files as I have lost the date created data so the files can now not be ordered? ta

[Carlos]

Pass. sorry. Other than renaming the file, eg 2020-05-13-clip.mp4 or whatever.

[JimmyRiddle]

Carlos, thanks for advice on Photo Video Editor, didn't know that was there!

So I batch encoded on Handbrake all the short clips from .MOD to .MP4, which came in at 1.6Gb; also I found a setting to keep the original modified date.

Stitched these together on video editor, added a couple of title slides, and exported: it took overnight, it was so slow; but eventually finished but I ended up with a 6Gb+ file for a 40min vid??

That doesn't seem right! Need to look at that bit again I think!

 

[Carlos]

I work on the estimate of about a gig for every 10 mins so 6 gig isn't way out, but a bit big.

Using my new camera, I can get nearly a full half of football into 4gb.

The old camera would do 25 mins max in 4gb.

[JimmyRiddle]

But the component clips were a 1/4 the size in total; how does it get so bloated??

 

 

Edited May 14, 2020 by JimmyRiddle

[Carlos]

I guess it's the way the encoding works, or it they were low res and you've rendered at a higher one?

[Casino]

Can i jump on this

If i wanted to set up some beat the intros, how would i go about it

Audio only

[e2e4]

^ itunes used to be able to do that. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDxQYZARi6

in the example , it looks like hes got a file thats just above 28 seconds , but it mustnt be looping correctly for use as a ringtone (maybe it chops off half a note and sounds daft) , so he manually picks the start and end points , and it spits out a new file. 

cant really see or hear it all on me phone , but it does what he asked

ffmpeg or handbrake summat might be able to do that with a batch file on a folder full of music. never really been great at editing stuff down like this. if all the intros are different lengths , well.. 

gimme the vinyl rip with the needle hitting the wax, and half a minute of the locked groove or it sounds wrong to me. Side A / Side B . 

--

the OP might want to look at mkvtoolnix, specifically the MKVMerge part , which iirc can combine multiple video files into 'Tracks' in(side) one MKV file. dont think it does reencoding, it just puts the existing files inside a MKV container file. so it shouldnt take hours like reencoding would. 

think the syntax would be summat like

mkvmerge -o full.mkv [file1.mov file2.avi file3.mpg]

might come out better , i tried using it once, but i did it wrong and i think the track/file marks got ignored in the end file, i think i shouldve used "append" rather than "add" .. im on me phone so cant test it out... 

 the instructions are long. and the GUI add-on might make it easier to use.. 

might save time as reencoding takes ages, whether the tv can play the resulting MKV file is a different question though... 

the metadata should survive as normally you can add text and photos to MKV files if you want, whether the media player can read them or not, so it would be weird for it to strip out metadata like date and time, if you can add any old file into the container itself. imo. 

And MOD files in your situation are renamed regular normal MPEG2 files (theyre not apple movs or cinepak or whatever ), you might have better luck with playback or whatever if you change back the file extension to .mpg firstly before making the MKV or looking at them in handbrake/mediaplayer to make sure theyre ok before you start.. 

hth

 

 

 

Edited May 15, 2020 by e2e4
added urls

[JimmyRiddle]

Cheers e2e4, Looks a bit complicated for me to be honest.

So found 'Vidcoder' which seems to use the Handbrake back-end but keeps the meta data, so that's that sorted.

I am now batch encoding 50 clips at a time and it seems to be coping Ok, just leave it running to convert from .MOD to .MP4

Then using Video Editer in MS Photos to stitch together end exporting.

I just needed to play with the settings, the original clips are only SD anyway, so can use pretty pretty low video settigs which obviousy speeds up the process.

 

[e2e4]

22 hours ago, JimmyRiddle said:

Cheers e2e4, Looks a bit complicated for me to be honest.

So found 'Vidcoder' which seems to use the Handbrake back-end but keeps the meta data, so that's that sorted.

I am now batch encoding 50 clips at a time and it seems to be coping Ok, just leave it running to convert from .MOD to .MP4

Then using Video Editer in MS Photos to stitch together end exporting.

I just needed to play with the settings, the original clips are only SD anyway, so can use pretty pretty low video settigs which obviousy speeds up the process.

 

you shouldnt need to do that. just rename the mod files from , video1.mod to video1.mpg .. 

all the evidence about jvc camcorders says theyre regular mpeg2 files with stupid file names. 

converting them into mpeg4 is possibly a waste of time. might make them bigger and look crapper. 

you need a batch renamer or summat if youve got hundreds , would save loads of time. 

try renaming one file , open it in summat like vlc player, if you can see and hear it , they are mpeg2 (or whatever) videos. 

they do stuff like this to stop other media players playing the videos back. 

https://dotwhat.net/file/extension/mod/2483

and the timestamps are seperate .moi files (might be why youre losing metadata)

https://dotwhat.net/file/extension/moi/8618

AND..

this computer program by some german or austrian guy helps with the moi timestamps and the widescreen flags and metadata , probably renames the extensions to mpg if you want..

looks like it were specifically written for these jvc/cannon/whatever files, so its been pissing off more than just you. id assume it works with windows 10, even though its from years ago. 

might wanna use duplicates of the original video files incase it messes something up, so you can go back if needed. 

looked on youtube too, so it seems right to me  .. 

 

Edited May 16, 2020 by e2e4
typo

[JimmyRiddle]

Top man! That little executable will save me forever! Clips now work as .mpg with VLC, Media player & the 'films & TV' app

But guess what: they are not recognised by the Video Editor in MS Photo App! Wtf?

I may take Carlo's advice and pay for Adobe Premier Rush.

Thanks for help

PS. What are widescreen flags? ta

Edited May 16, 2020 by JimmyRiddle

[e2e4]

3 hours ago, JimmyRiddle said:

Top man! That little executable will save me forever! Clips now work as .mpg with VLC, Media player & the 'films & TV' app

But guess what: they are not recognised by the Video Editor in MS Photo App! Wtf?

I may take Carlo's advice and pay for Adobe Premier Rush.

Thanks for help

PS. What are widescreen flags? ta

widescreen flags are just a marker in a file that tells the player how to show the video, so its displayed in the correct aspect 16:9 or whatever , if you just did the plain renaming trick , it might get lost and shown wrongly in the player. 

(im using the wrong term, but its similar to "active format description" and "WSS" that broadcast tv uses to display things with the correct shape to them. )

id tick that box, fwiw without knowing what your camera is , as i think its the correct thing to do. if your camera doesnt do widescreen recording then leave it unticked.. maybe.. you might know better ..

its why some football videos on youtube looks like the goals are a million yards wide or newsreaders are overly broad shouldered, or people look like thin rakes , sometimes stuff like that is set incorrectly and so doesnt get shown in the right way when its played back. 

i presume its one of the reasons the austrian dude wrote the program, stuff like date and time and aspect ratio mustve been stored  in a seperate  MOI file than the video , so this program combines them into one mpeg file with the video and the technical info together in one file. 

things like avis (which cant store widescreen markers , flags, and settings normally) have been replaced with things like mpegs and mkv fiies . its because you can store non video info in these newer files types. 

glad it worked. 

the photos app on windows is one of them UWP programs in the microsoft store app, update it from that to see if it can read them with a newer version  .. 

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/microsoft-photos/9wzdncrfjbh4 is its website

sez version 2019.19061.18920.0 is the current version number of the app. 

other than that , i dunno why it wont open them *now* theyve been 'fixed' to normal mpegs. that seems backwards. 

hmm , weird. as long as you keep the originals and the modded ones, you can always go back and try different things later. 

better than nowt  . 

 

 

 

Edited May 16, 2020 by e2e4
typo