Suggestion to Help Noobs (like me)

[Gerard V]

For noobs like myself, a guide or section in the forum FAQ that describes how to extract a few frames of video to attach to a forum post would be most useful. The main thing would be to show how various formats (MPEG, AVI etc.) can be cut to a few frames and posted without inadvertently reprocessing or filtering the clip along the way and so that advice given applies accurately to the "oringal" video. I have been looking but I haven't found such a guide. JMTWC. :o

[Mshake]

i believe that is viable idea but one concern might be encouraging people to simply cut a video/section of the videos and posting it to forums, simply expecting help without fully understanding what they want to do...?

I am a noob as well myself in these forums/editing although I have done encodings using pre-made tools by guys here. I have seen people who cut clips for other experts to examine and most of them seem to know what is wrong/what they wanted.

Tools for cutting most formats should be easily obtainable (freeware or shareware). Not sure how the admin will answer this though.

cheers,

[mike_lee]

A lot of those tools either don't explain what you;re doing, the newbee doesn't understand, but the end result is often a really bad re-encode.
For WMV I use the MS program Windows Media File editor, or asfbin
For mpg I use VitualDub -MPEG2 or a hex editor
AVI Virtual dub in Direct Stream copy
For .RM I use a shotgun

Stuff like that is easy to learn, understanding simple concepts like what avi really is, or how to use ffdshow, what a color space is, how to change 4cc - that's the tough stuff that never gets explained.

[Gerard V]

After messing about and trying things, there's a point where one will probably post a message asking for help. Shortly after that, one of the helpful folk here will ask you to post up a link to a few frames of the video in question. At that point, what does the noob do? There's a good chance that in preparing a short clip to post that they (me really) will process it in some way that makes the resulting advice possibly irrelevant to the original clip. What codec to use, or is uncompressed OK? So a page on how to make a 10 frame clip to post on the forums without botching it, would be useful at that point. I still don't know the answer. :cool:

[cweb]

For mpeg2 I use mpg2cut2 (http://www.geocities.com/rocketjet4) to extract part of an MPEG-2 file.

[foxyshadis]

We almost need to have a forum full of stickies, or just tell everyone to read this or that wiki first before posting and put all the relevant info there. Otherwise you end up with ten+ stickies a forum, and new threads spill over into the next page.