Alternatives to VDub(Mod) and Windows Movie Maker for basic, newbie-friendly editing?

[Chainmax]

A friend of mine is looking for alternatives to either of these two programs that would allow him to easily do basic editing tasks like concatenating several videos into one file. His sources are captures of widescreen footage (so, pretty large files) in an AVI container. He did not mention the codec, but I assume it's DV. What would you recommend in this regard?

[LoRd_MuldeR]

I think VirtualDub should be pretty user-friendly for that task. But Avidemux definitely would be an alternative to VirtualDub.

[setarip_old]

concatenating several videos into one file. His sources are captures of widescreen footage (so, pretty large files) in an AVI container.Good ol' "Copy /B" from a command line...

[Chainmax]

I am going to recommend it to him them, thanks for the quick reply :). Can it do basic transition effects too?

[edit]setarip_old: yeah, I mentioned that, but he told me that was not really an option, he wanted to do some editing at the transitions.

[LoRd_MuldeR]

I am going to recommend it to him them, thanks for the quick reply :). Can it do basic transition effects too?

There is a "fade" filter, along with a bunch of other useful filters (deinterlace, resize, crop, color correction, etc.)

Good ol' "Copy /B" from a command line...

This won't work with anything but "raw" streams, I think ;)

Simply concatenating one AVI container file to another existing AVI file doesn't result in a valid AVI file, for example.

Also joining files of different format/resolution usually requires re-encoding of at least some of the segments...

[MatLz]

Hi my Lord!
This won't work with anything but "raw" streams, I think ;)

Hmm...but if I use this method (copy /b) on m2v, the file obtained is corrupted with blocky frames at the beginning of the second part...but it perfectly works with VOB...why?

[LoRd_MuldeR]

Either because the second segment misses some information to properly initialize the decoder -or- because the decoder/player doesn't like format changes within a stream.

BTW: The VOB files on a Video-DVD are simply contiguous files split at a 1 GB boundary, so re-joining them works naturally.

But if you take a bunch of arbitrary (elementary) MPEG-2 streams, they may use different encoding parameters or the individual files may not even start with an I-Frame!

If the first few frames of a segment are distorted, but later the video is good, then this is almost certainly because of a bad file cut (that is: missing references).

[MatLz]

In fact I noticed that on an anime dvd which have separate intro, main episode and outro.
I will take a look at other sources.
Well, to be in topic: Virtualdub, Avidemux...what? Already said? :)

[manolito]

IMO another nice alternative to Windows Movie Maker is VideoPad by NCHSoftware. It is free, easy to use and supports a lot more video formats than Movie Maker.

Cheers
manolito