Video Editing Woes

I’ve been experiencing a bunch of frustration lately with video editing. Software limitations, format limitations, conversion necessities, etc., etc. But, let me start more from the beginning…

A little while back I bought a 15" PowerBook. It’s the first laptop I’ve ever owned and I got it for a variety of reasons, ranging from simply being curious about OS X to wanting to do some video editing on a platform that’s supposed to be far superior to the PC in this respect.

On the PC side, I’ve already managed to get to the point where I created a custom :DVD: with a number of titles and chapters within each title. Not quite professional quality I’ll be the first to admit, but certainly not bad at all. The process took a lot of trial and error and much of it simply had to do with learning some of the basics of what’s involved with it all as well as experimenting with various software pieces. I’d bought a multi-format DVD-writer a while ago and it worked wonderfully for making the actual DVDs. Once I figured the process out, it was pretty good.

Now, one of the things I must make mention of here is my capture card. It’s a Hauppauge PVR-250, which contains a TV-tuner as well as regular video-in/capture capability. This is nice since it lets me record TV shows when I want. The card, though, captures straight to the MPEG-2 format. This is convenient in some ways since it’s the same format that’s used on DVDs, but it’s rather inconvenient due to the fact that MPEG-2 isn’t really designed to be an editing format so much as it is a distribution format. Most video editors are designed to work with AVIs, Quicktime files, or other formats like that. There are, however, some programs on the PC that allow you to directly edit (copy, cut, trim, and join) MPEG-2 files. That’s what I used when making my custom DVD.

And here lies the problem: there just isn’t the same type of software available for OS X. Quicktime and “DV streams” are the formats of choice for everything video-related on the Mac. That’s understandable, but it still really surprised me that I simply could not find something on the Mac that would just let me trim my MPEG-2 files like I wanted. Every solution I could find required multiple steps spent demuxing, importing, exporting, converting, etc. It wasn’t something I wanted to be forced to do; especially after I’d discovered tools that let me do the necessary editing in one step on the PC.

It’s during this period that I was furiously emailing and IMing back and forth to the ever-helpful and surprisingly-patient Derek. You may know him as the other guy who posts here. Anyway, Derek is, effectively, my OS X support center and graciously answers my questions and helps me out when I have no doubt at all that he’d much rather be doing something else. By the end of the period in question I was so severely frustrated with the hoops that I was having to jump through that I was shouting and cursing at anyone and everyone that crossed my path, not least of which was Derek in his emails that were an attempt to help me out. My apologies, man—I’ve been a royal ass the last couple of days and you certainly don’t deserve the abuse I threw your way.

So… that brings us up to now. Unfortunately, I still haven’t found anything that enables the sort of simple “one-step” editing I was doing on the PC, but I have at least found a method that lets me do what I need to do. The problem to me is that it’s many more steps than I really want to have to perform for every video clip that I be needing to edit. So, what can I do about that, I wondered?

I’m now hoping that Apple’s AppleScript might be the answer. It’s something between an OS macro and a regular programming language. I’m going to have to really read up about it, but hopefully I can figure out how to use it to automate the steps necessary to get my files to the point at which I can edit them. It may take a while to actually perform all the steps, but if I can get the AppleScript to work like I’m hoping, it may just be a one-step thing to initiate the AppleScript and have it automate everything to get to the point where I can edit. We’ll see.

Regardless, I’ve made a decision to really try and stop bitching and complaining (especially to Derek!) and instead try and actually solve these problems. Hopefully, I’ll be successful.

Posted Thursday February 12, 2004 in Rants by Chris Curtis

This is an older entry and as such, it may be by a guest author or contain formatting problems / extraneous code. If you notice something wrong with the entry, please use the Contact page to let me know the entry title and issue.

Thanks bro, I know where your frustration is, and I could help out some by not having thin skin.

As far as I know, Quicktime is fully Applescriptable, though I’ve never done scripting for it before. I’ll load up its dictionary/library and look around.

Apple could go a long way to help out and accept MPEG-2 files within iDVD, or by removing the very arbitrary 2gb clip size limit in iMovie. Either of the two would be of assistance. iDVD is what surprises me more, I guess. Of course, I’m used to DVD Studio Pro, and I guess there’s a reason that movie houses don’t use iDVD. I found out today that iDVD won’t keep 16:9 either, and had to make my DVD in DVDSP, which I don’t mind, but for personal use, iDVD is a heck of a lock quicker to make something that looks and operates niftily.

Anyway, back to the task at hand, and for anyone who I know will stumble on this thread within a few weeks, as Chris’s site comes up as #1 for oh, every Google search I do: here is the current list of steps required for removing commercials from an MPEG-2 captured television show, and putting it on DVD.

Requires Quicktime Pro, the Quicktime MPEG-2 Playback component, iTunes, iDVD, and DiVa

1) Demux the MPEG-2 with DiVa
2) Open the audio file (.mp2) with iTunes, and convert it to AIFF
3) Open the demux’d video file (.m2v) in Quicktime Pro, and the AIFF
4) Select All in the AIFF. Then, in the video file, with the marker at the zero position on the timeline, use the Edit menu command “Add Scaled”, which will join the two in a way that Quicktime is happy with it.
5) Export to a DV Stream
6) Open the DV stream in Quicktime Pro and edit out the commercials
7) Drag and drop the DV Stream file into your iDVD project and create your DVD

By Derek Jones on February 12, 2004 at 07:07pm link

I could possibly have the export and edit commercial steps out of order--I don’t know for sure if it will allow you to edit first. If not, export to DV, then edit, and just Save your file. No need for a second Export.

There is another solution that uses Roxio’s Toast, but that’s another $80. I did find an Applescript that controls a Unix app that splits MPEGs into multiple files. It allows you to set split points in the Quicktime timeline (regular version is ok for this), and then feeds that information to a command line app that splits it up for you, naming them sequentially, with your commercials (or other edits) removed. Then you drag the whole mess of files into Toast’s DVD / VCD window, and it will rejoin them, and use each file break as a chapter marker, which is convenient.

Bad thing about Toast--again, it’s $80, and you can’t make nifty menus and motion indexes like you can with iDVD. They aren’t bad, but Toast is really a burning app, not a design app.

By Derek Jones on February 12, 2004 at 07:07pm link

I couldn’t figure out how to demux with Diva, but mpgtx worked for me. It’s also a wrapper for a command-line utility, so that could be better for AppleScripting, but I don’t know for sure yet.

I also edited your steps above a little to correct a couple of things (adding AIFF to m2v instead of the other way around and exporting to DV before editing).

Figuring this AppleScript stuff out enough to actually do something is going to take some effort…

By Chris Curtis on February 12, 2004 at 07:35pm link

AppleScript is “human language”, so honestly, it’s a bit more cryptic to sort out for people used to coding.

Sort out what you want to do in pseudo-code, and I’ll try to help you script it.

By Derek Jones on February 12, 2004 at 10:09pm link

Umm… steps 1 - 6a from the list above? Basically, I’d just like to get to the point where I can actually start editing the video.

By Chris Curtis on February 12, 2004 at 10:31pm link

The extra preparation will make you apprec...it will benefit the final quali....it will allow you to enj....I got nothin.

By Derek Jones on February 12, 2004 at 10:33pm link

why not ebay the capture card and get a mac one? sounds like it would save a shitload or problems....

btw i got a capture card for like $50 bucks and it does mpeg 1, 2, and 4. Not a bad price for what it does.

By Greg Ferrell on February 13, 2004 at 08:18am link

k what the hell CC, does your site hate me?

http://www.msicomputer.com/product/netpc/netpc_detail.asp?model=TV@nywhere

twas the url i wanted.

By Greg Ferrell on February 13, 2004 at 08:25am link

Just an update, for Greggo’s benefit mostly, I stayed up until 3am last night creating said Applescript. It’s not pretty and I wouldn’t distribute it to others in its current state, but I now have a drag and drop solution that eliminates steps 1-6a, or rather, does it with little user input.

By Derek Jones on February 13, 2004 at 08:32am link

Chris Curtis dot Org

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