Quick & Dirty MPEG-2 editing

[Warmbeer]

Haven't been on here in a while, was about to post this in Capturing and Editing Video/DV but seems that forum has been moribund since August other than 1 sticky update. Did i miss something? Should I have posted this over there?

Anyway, I'm capturing featured restaurant shows (DDD, Unique Eats, etc., ~50 shows, > 2K episodes)to an MPEG-2 file and want to cut out commercials and break the file into segments for each restaurant.

Currently I use Gsplit, which is a simple file splitter, to break the video up in pieces at the commercial points and to separate show segments. GSplit is very fast to do this (breakdown a 3 hr, 3GB file into 1, 1 hr & 4 half hr segments in 6.5 min.)

I have been determining the break points by dividing the bytes of the original file by the seconds of video and then multiplying the seconds of each video segment i want to extract by that bytes/second value. It has worked fairly well but I've had a few files where the break is off by a second or 2. When putting the GSplit pieces through MediaInfo i get slightly different values for both the General bit rate and the Video bit rate for each piece, but all values for video & audio are CBR.

I am guessing that the differences are due to breaking the pieces at different points within the packet, which might throw off those calculations slightly.

My question is this, is there any reasonable costing (<$150) editing software that can simply break up MPEG-2 video with no need to change resolution/format, etc. into pieces at the desired breakpoints at a comparable speed to Gsplit on my Pent 4 - 2.8 GHz box? I've tried a bunch of free or trial versions and they all take nearly real time (1 hr file takes nearly an hour to split in 2 or 3 pieces)

Or is there another way to get a more accurate calculation for the Gsplit breakpoints?

TIA for any assistance.
ed

[Emulgator]

Mpeg2Schnitt 0.90 (Freeware)
VideoReDo ($)

[manolito]

Cuttermaran (Free)

Cheers
manolito

[Warmbeer]

Looks like VideoReDo will do the trick. Might even work with just the demo version since all my segments are less than 15 min. A little kludgy getting multiple files from one, but workable.

MPEG2Schnitt wouldn't read my MPEG-2 files. According to the comments I might have needed an extra dll but the German help was not much. In any case VRD should do me fine.

Thanks much for the suggestions.
ed

[Mixer73]

Looks like VideoReDo will do the trick. Might even work with just the demo version since all my segments are less than 15 min. A little kludgy getting multiple files from one, but workable.

VideoReDo is a weapon of an editor and is well supported and well worth the money, IMO.

I use a program called VAP which is a batch auto-processor which can batch all your ad scans, creating key points around your ads you can quickly navigate and cut.

i can cut up an hour show in 30 seconds or so.

[Warmbeer]

Sounds like it's worth a look. I'll check it out.

While I'm at it, knowing it's a long shot, but wondering if there is any software that can get rid of those annoying little promo overlays that all the shows are using now? The ones that promote the next show or some other show and are usually near the bottom corners and semi-transparent. Is there a name for these things? Anyway, much appreciate all the helpful suggestions here.
ed

[Mixer73]

While I'm at it, knowing it's a long shot, but wondering if there is any software that can get rid of those annoying little promo overlays that all the shows are using now? The ones that promote the next show or some other show and are usually near the bottom corners and semi-transparent. Is there a name for these things? Anyway, much appreciate all the helpful suggestions here.ed

No, they are normally known as bottom thirds and they annoy but you can't easily remove them apart from cropping the whole video!

[setarip_old]

@Warmbeer

Hi!

You might try searching for "logo removal" or similar...