Editing videos

[ame]

Programs and methods to edit videos
will be described in this topic.

i'm sure that many of our members are much more skillful and more experienced in these methods than i, so this topic may seem a bit useless in they eyes (hopefully not downright ridiculous!). but i also know that some of our members don't know much about these tricks. i know i didn't know anything when i became a member. the little i have learned i have learned while i have been in LK.

some of these editing methods have already been described elsewhere in the Questions and help-topic. i shall now collect them here under one title. this will take some time so be patient. i also invite our more experienced members to write posts about their favourite methods here.

[ame]

one possibility of editing videos is to use the
Windows Movie Maker
if you have Windows in your pc. i have but i have used it only very seldom. this is mainly because it was very slow and it was not very easy to use. therefore i dont't know much anything about it. i have only made some kind of time-lapse videos of Pontu pictures with it.

maybe someone who has used it more would write how to use it.

[ame]

RealPlayer

has been used by for example Fleur. here you will find some things she has written about RealPlayer:
viewtopic.php?p=60019#p60019
and here she describes the method how to trim a video with RealPlayer.
viewtopic.php?p=60880#p60880

thank you Fleur!

[ame]

primitive editing with VLC-player

i have used VLC for some very primitive editing. first one can "trim" a video by re-recording a VLC-video. just play the video and start recording about 10 s before the part where the wanted action starts. stop a few seconds after you have recorded all you wanted to have. of course this is not a very practical method if you want to get a fairly long clip out of an even longer original video, but as a crude method it will work. it's very practical for short clips.

it is also possible to make slow motion videos with this method by adjusting the play-back speed. this does not work with slower speeds than 1/3 of normal speed.

[ame]

SolveigMM AVI Trimmer

Mutikluti introduced this program to me. thank you Mutikluti!
i downloaded the program from here:
http://www.freewarefiles.com/SolveigMM- ... 19798.html

in installing the program it is probably a good idea to keep an eye on what else they try to make you download or install. as usual they try to filter in other stuff, too, so consider which boxes should be ticked and which to un-tick.


especially this latter was slightly alarming.

[ame]

when you start the program you get a choice where the Trimmer is free to use, the others are free trials. i choose the free trimmer.


to import a video file for trimming you can
* either drag&drop the video file from its folder to the Solveig window
* or you can click "open" and search and open the video file from the directory tree.


when you have finished with the trimming selections and you are ready to start select the folder where the product video is to be saved. Solveig will remember this selection and will use it in the following trimmings as long as another folder is selected.

[ame]

here's a picture of the lower part of the Solveig window where the trimming controls are.


in the big window (which is shown only partially above) the picture is from where the pointer 4 is located above the video/sound track. this pointer can be moved by the mouse along the video track. the exact position of the marker in time since the beginning of the video versus the total lenght of the video can be seen under the major window's lower left corner.

pointers 3 under the video track are used to mark end/start points on the video. the selected section is highlighted with an orange bar. on the lowest line in the centre the times of the start and end of the selection are shown, measured from the beginning of the original video.

new markers to define more sections in the video can be added by clicking buttons in the lower left corner (inside ellipse 1).

the video which i used as an example if farly long, almost 37 min, so the time line on the video track is in 3 min intervals. first find approximately where is the section which you want to trim and move the pointer there. then you can zoom in to more detailed time resolution by clicking the tiny box with the magnifying glass+ in the green rectangle 2 on the right. then you can select desired resolution
* either in the drop-down menu which opens
* or you may click the magnifying glass+ several times and the resolution increases at every click.
when the resolution is fine enough then you can slide the start and end markers to the positions of your choice more easily.

in the following picture i have zoomed to 15 s -resolution. nothing else is changed from the above situation.


here's a close-up of a detail. on the left side of the pointer Durbe is with Durberts, and on the right side Robert has arrived with a fish. so this is a suitable starting point of a fish-delivery video.

[ame]

this picture shows a further increase of resolution to 5 s. Robert with the fish can be seen at 34:05. at 33:55 there is some louder sounds on the video which are probably worth keeping on the clip. therefore it is appropriate to move the start pointer a little left of these sounds.


before looking for the suitable place for the end marker it is perhaps best to return to less accurate resolution by clicking a few times on the magnifying glass - which can be seen inside the red triangle.
- OR you can move to the end of selection by moving the slider 2 inside the red rectangle, to the right in this example. this should be done slowly because otherwise the position marker will slip out of the view quite quickly. the slider will be moved more slowly by clicking the right-forward button (inside the red triangle on the left side of the magnifying glass-button).

look for a suitable place for the end marker. then you are ready to start trimming. click on the orange START-button with flag in the lower right corner. Solveig will ask where you wish to save the product. select folder and name and click go.

[ame]

here's an example of a video which has several interesting parts. i have marked here sections which seem to have loud sounds in them. i have placed the pointer on a section with a lot of sounds so this section is highlighted with orange. the other sections are blue, except the left-most and right-most sections which are black. they are excluded (trimmed out) because i moved the left-most start pointer to the right and the right-most stop pointer to the left, and thus i excluded those section from the video altogether.

about the other sections i need to tell Solveig which i want to keep and which should be cut out.
this is done by moving the pointer to each section and selecting one of the choices in the EDIT-drop-down menu inside the blue rectangle: keep or cut out. this is especially practical for example cutting out commercials from films or TV programs which you have recorded.


if you wish to make several clips of one video you need to select one section at a time for keeping and un-select the rest, and them make several clips one at a time.

i have noticed that if trimming is all that is needed then Solveig is much quicker than AVC which i have used for both clipping and converting videos. probably it is the conversion which takes a lot of time. i think that AVC is slow because it sort of winds to the start point of the clip very slowly before it even starts doing anything. Solveig probably goes straight to the start point. the difference in their speeds is especially pronounced with very long videos (several hours long like Pontu videos).

if a Pontu video is downloaded from the archive before it has finished recording then the End-Of-File marker (EOF) will be missing from its end. one great advantage of Solveig is that it seems to be able to handle these 'broken' videos much-much faster than AVC. i just process the Pontu video without an EOF with Solveig and within less than a minute i get a decent video which can easily be further trimmed and handled. with AVC this process may take hours. Solveig beats AVC with a million to one in this competition.

i still need AVC for converting videos, even normal VLC-videos, because Youtube still can't process all of them without processing them to mp4. i can't understand why because Vlc records videos in mp4.... this is a mystery to me.

this is what i have learned so far. i think it is a good start. when you learn more tricks please make a post of them here.

[ame]

i made a picture which shows how exceptional sounds can be found 'visually' in a video using Solveig AVI Trimmer.
when you load a video in Solveig it will show sample pictures along the video. below these pictures it shows the profile of the intensity of the audio track which is shown in blue colour below the small picture track. the upper border of this lines gives some information of the general loudness of the sounds (including noise level). the lower edge of the profile gives information of the loudness or intensity of indivial 'real' sounds. the longer a spike is (downwards) the louder the sound is.

the picture shows a 1-hour-long example video which was recorded in a normal sunny summer evening at an empty nest where nothing seemed to happen except that the sun was setting. the forest was full of birds who very singing around the camera. these bird voices created a more or less uniform carpet of sounds. i have marked with a red arrow a spike which differs from the uniform background sounds.


when i expanded the 'resolution' of the sound track one can see that the thick spike consists of 7 thinner spikes (sounds that are shorter in time) which are about equally long meaning that they are equally loud. these short sounds also have regular, approximately equally long silent spaces between them.


i made a clip of the video. the origin of the sounds was a cuckoo.