I need a relatively simple video editing software. Basically, what I need to be able to do is this:
Take H264 AVC MP4 video (specifically from shadowplay) and be able to trim it and save it into clips. So I may have a 5 minute video, and I may want to simply save everything that happened from 1:00 to 1:30, and 2:30 to 3:00. So the 5 minute video becomes a one minute video, with two 30 second clips in it. I don’t want it to transcode and lose the quality of the video at this stage, I just want the clips trimmed. I understand that that may limit me to cutting in at a keyframe that was originally part of the video. I can live with that. But if there’s software that’s able to write a new keyframe to start the video at any arbitrary spot, better.
Then at some later point, I want to be able to string together several of these clips into a compilation video. So simply adding a few clips back to back to back. Again no transcoding, just taking several small clips and making one longer movie with them. I want no quality loss at this stage, there’s no need for it.
At that point, and this can be part of step 2, I want to be able to transcode the video to a lower bitrate version of the codec, and/or alter the frame rate. So there should be no quality loss at the initial stage of trimming videos into clips, and then stringing clips into a compilation, but the final stage can be lossy.
And that’s pretty much it. If I could do some sort of basic video editing stuff like adding annotations or adding music, great, but not strictly necessary.
An example of the sort of simple video I’m looking to output is something like this, which I did in virtualdub.
Virtualdub did fit my needs when I was recording using fraps, it was able to read the fraps video just fine, trim and transcode clips to any codec I had installed (I used xvid), and then later string them together in direct copy mode. But even then I was kind of unsatisfied - it’s adequate, but it’s very primitive, it isn’t multithreaded and it doesn’t use GPU for encoding, so it would encode at something like 13 FPS, which would get tedious. But more importantly, I just can’t get it to handle H264 video correctly. I installed an H264 VFW codec, and while it now goes through the motion of editing and transcoding instead of giving an error, the end result video ends up just being a black screen with audio.
Windows live movie maker actually has adequate editing tools for my need (better than virtualdub even), but WMV is awful, and it has no direct copy mode. I’d be taking H264 and encoding into WMV (alone bleh), and then when I strung the videos together, it would transcode rather than string together the movies, re-WMVing the already blotchy WMV videos. The end result looks pretty bad.
I’ve seen Sony Vegas and twiddled around with it a little bit, but it seemed really complex and beyond my needs. I don’t know what to do with multiple tracks and all of the crazy features it has.
AVIDemux may be an option, but I’m having some issues with that. I’d like something a little less primitive ideally, but currently, even though it isn’t transcoding when I save two clips together (the resulting output is instant), it’s doing weird stuff to the frame rate and the colors - the result looks noticibly worse than the input. I don’t understand why. It’s definitely doing something funky, though, because while media player classic ran read the original videos just fine, when AVIDemux strings two of them together, MPC just displays a blank screen. VLC still reads them, though. But there’s something funky going on with that.