Simple Copy Editing with VirtualDub so long?

[stretch]

Hello all,

Athon 1.5 ghz
>500 mb of ram
7200 rpm ibm 80 gb hard drive
20 gb hard drive scratch disk

This is sort of a two fold question:
I am taking an huffy encoded 720x480 avi file and chopping it up to cut out commercials, using VirtualDub. Later I will append all the chopped up parts back to one avi file for svcd encoding thru TMPGenc.

1) Is it normal for VirtualDub to take such a long time to just edit out part of an avi (it is dubbing at like 5fps) keep in mind I am not encoding here I just what a original piece of the avi? I do have direct stream copy enabled.

2)Is this the proper approach to cutting out commercials and getting ready for TMPGenc?

Thanks Much I A
Stretch

[N_F]

1) No, that is not normal. Expected speeds are between 800-1400 fps depending on how many streams you handle (you could for instance have several audio tracks, in which case it'll be a little slower). Normally I'd bet all my money that you forgot to select Direct Stream Copy, but since you say you did...

Come to think of it, I've never done what you do with huffyuv, but that still shouldn't be a problem as far as I know.

Do you have the diskspace?

2) There are many possible ways to do it. You could for instance use Avisynth's trim() command. But I'd say cutting with VirtualDub is as good a way as any other, and probably the easiest.

[Selur]

About the speed, did you try to save the 'new' avi on your other hdd?

[Leuf]

800 fps on huffyuv isn't going to happen, but 5 fps is awfully slow. I usually get about 60-70 fps going from hdd to hdd, 30-40 fps going to the same hdd. Hdd performance should be the bottleneck.

If all you are doing is editing out commercials then a better approach is to frameserve to tmpgenc, and I find that it's simpler to do this with avisynth's trim function than mucking around with it in vdub, but you can do it that way too.