[colug-432] Best tools for video.

[Dave Maxwell]

On Fri November 13 2009, Dave Maxwell wrote:

> I'm going to try doing a cuts only edit strictly in Avidemux, do a
> copy(video)/copy(audio) on the result and ccextractor that.  Is this the
> best I can do or do better tools exist?

This works.  If you don't want to muck about separately editing and retiming 
captions then get the mpeg with analog embedded closed captions arranged in 
time however you like.  Most especially do not crop the top or bottom of the 
picture.  Stick to cuts and insertions of identically encoded mpeg only.  
Once all unwanted material has been clipped or additional material added, 
export back out to an mpeg choosing "copy" as the codec; this operation 
should be fairly fast.  Run ccextractor on that to get an srt file that is 
matched in time to what is currently in the editor.  

At this point feel free to export to avi, mp4, deinterlace, denoise, crop or 
what have you. Just don't do cuts or additions that change the length or 
arrangement in time of the video.

The mpeg exported is an intermediate product and can be deleted if the only 
intent was to convert analog closed captions to digital subtitles.

I'd like it better if the editor itself was caption aware and kept them 
matched up to changes in the video but this is workable.

I'll also note that most of the video came from a Kingwin KM-31K hard drive 
video recorder.  It is one of many devices based on the rtd1261/rtd1262 video 
codec chip.  The chipset in the devices typically include a MIPS processor 
and run a small embedded Linux and they are hackable in various ways.

Dave

-- 
If only you had a personality instead of an attitude.