Non-rendering Editor?

[stevefoobar]

There are many times when I have a large video file that contains only a small section of usable video and it would be great to be able to use a simple editor to "cut out" the sections I don't want and re-write the file as a shorter file of just the good sections to save hard drive space.  In other words, a program that would just modify the file internally at the file level and then re-write the file, not actually edit the original file in a typical video editor and have to re-render the file to get the new file, since this causes degradation in the output.

Has anyone ever heard of such software that does this?  Technically it seems like it should be possible, since it's just a matter of reordering and reconstructing the file bytes in the file structure of the video file.

Thanks.

Steve

Chicago, IL USA

[ribault]

How about the software that came with the TX1?  Canon's ZoomBrowser can do this, I think.

[stevefoobar]

As far as I can tell, this software was really designed for management and editing of still images, not video files.  If you try you get an error message stating it can't edit video files.

Since I posted this however, I have found an amazing FREE Open Source program that I would imagine everyone on this forum would be intersted in downloading and learning!  It's called VirtualDub and has the ability to do extremely rapid editing and rendering and most importantly to me, it can do what I was asking for, which is do a smart render (they call it "direct mode") that in most instances will create an output video file using the data from the input video file WITHOUT RE-RENDERING.

Here is where you can find out more about it and download the latest version:
http://www.virtualdub.org/
http://virtualdub.sourceforge.net/

Enjoy!

Steve
Chicago, IL USA

[James]

Unfortunately for users of other platforms, VirtualDub is only for 32 bit Windows

[stevefoobar]

That's too bad.  I'm on WinXP Pro SP3 so I never considered this.  Maybe the author will port it to other platforms eventually.  People can always request this I guess.

[robocat]

That's too bad.  I'm on WinXP Pro SP3 so I never considered this.  Maybe the author will port it to other platforms eventually.  People can always request this I guess.

VirtualDub *is* for windows! I think one thing to watch for is there is some option you need to use with virtualdub when saving so that it doesn't re-encode the video and lose resolution - I don't use virtualdub so I don't know what the option is but I do know the option exists and AFAIK it is necessary.

this thread also mentions a few different programs of which some might help.

I have just started keeping the canonmsc/*.ctg files so that I can reupload old photo and video files to the SD card and be able to view them and edit them on the camera. I just need to upload the ctg file as well as the dcim/###canon/* files (I haven't actually had a chance to try this yet - I just thought of it yesterday!).  Note that for this to work well I think that you need to have the "create folder" menu option configured (I do Auto Create daily at 0:00) so that there are multiple *.ctg files.  I actually prefer to use the camera for editing cropping the length of videos because I trust it to do so losslessly and I like the UI (my only bugbear with the UI is that it rounds length up to nearest second so you can't stop on a selected frame).

[stevefoobar]

Good point about editing the video inside the camera but I'm afraid I don't have the patience for that because it is too tedious and too slow.  I also don't know that it's non-rendering type editing, although it's reasonable to assume it "should" be.  I wonder if Canon tech support even knows for sure...I kind of doubt it.