Looking for best way to quick chop HD Sage streams

[Jcage89]

I use a 9th Tee HD Homerun dual tuner with Sage and am wondering from the more experienced people here what is the best tool to simply chop the streams (i.e. edit out commecials and unwanted content) without altering the native resolutions of the stream or re-encoding it.

I did some searching and found older posts here suggesting use of virtualdub and the like, but I am unable to even open my streams in virtualdub as I get an "invalid marker/mpeg 2 stream error message.

Can anyone give some advice?

JC

[MeInMaui]

VideoRedo.

It isn't free, but it's the best tool for the job.

Aloha,
Mike

[bcjenkins]

Totally agree, worth every penny.

B

[Jcage89]

Originally Posted by MeInMaui

VideoRedo.

It isn't free, but it's the best tool for the job.

Aloha,
Mike

Thanks, got trial license and have already worked with a few files. This seems to be easy and very cool. Have you used it long? does it maintain the integrity of the stream between cuts? any audio sync problems you noticed?

JC

[tmiranda]

Originally Posted by Jcage89

Thanks, got trial license and have already worked with a few files. This seems to be easy and very cool. Have you used it long? does it maintain the integrity of the stream between cuts? any audio sync problems you noticed?

JC

I've used it for years. It actually improves the MPEGs by "cleaning up" various nasty things some of the encoder cards do. It's worth every penny I paid.

[Sam]

I totally agree with the others. I have used Video Redo for a long time and it is easily worth more than they charge for it. If you have any interest in also archiving any to DVDs, consider their TV Suite instead (which I upgraded to after it came out).

In terms of cutting commercials, what I found works best for me is to modify the hotkeys. I do virtually all of my marks and cuts using the keyboard and zero mouse activity. I use the following settings, but works for you is a personal preference thing:

Ctl left/right Forward/back one minute
Ctl-Shift left/right Forward/back 10 seconds
Shift left/right Forward/back 1 second
Left/right Forward/back 1 frame

Using those settings, I can very quickly advance until I see a commercial, then hone in on the exact frame where I want to cut. Use F3/F4 to mark the start/end point, and Delete to flag the segment to be cut.

I also recommend turning on the thumbnail view (F11 toggles it), because you not only get the thumbnails which are helpful in picking a frame, but you get an audio waveform which helps select the perfect frame.

It is so fast to manually mark commercials this way, that I don't bother with their Ad-Detective or other means. Some people prefer 2 or more minutes for one of the hotkeys. But I definately got way faster at it when I gave up the mouse and used only hotkeys.

[dgeezer]

I have also been using videoredo for years. I use comskip to output a .vprj file and then open that file. I use a simple batch file to cruise through the recordings folder and pick out the files that need editing.

I check to make sure that the cuts are correct. Often times I will have to adjust a few cuts. Comskip still seems to do a much better job than the built-in videoredo's ad-detective. It ony takes about 3 minutes for videoredo to write a new ad-free HD mpeg file.

I have got to try the thumbnail view. I didn't know that it existed.

I will also have to try the keyboard remap.

[Jcage89]

and all the advice on using it. This is exactly what I was looking for. I wish I were getting as much feedback on my other post in the software forum r/e choppy playback during timeshift here....

http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=34773

[davephan]

I also recommend using VideoReDo. I did try the suite, and I found it was very slow to create a DVD, but it could be done with one software package. I bought TMPGEnc (now use version 1.6) before buying VideoReDo. So, I used the TMPGEnc software to create DVDs - its faster, but some of the English text in the program is very sloppy, written by a non-native person. TMPGEnc is an unrefined editing tool compared to VideoReDo.

I found that VideoReDo is pretty fast to edit videos using the 'cut' method iwth the F3 (beginning) and F4 (end) shortcut keys. For navigation, I use the right/left keys and:

Unshifted - move next frame
Ctrl - move 0.5 seconds
Shift - move 1 minute
Ctrl + Shift move 1 minute

Another downside to VideoReDo is that it cannot edit compressed AVI files. The commercial detection isn't perfect, so it isn't very useful. The video stream fix is very useful if the video files are corrupted, but does not work if there is very severe corruption of the video files.

VideoReDo does reference using an open source DVD authoring software package, which I have not tried using.

Product upgrades and fixes are free without paying extra periodic fees. Upgrading to the Suite does cost a small upgrade fee since it is considered to be a different product.

Overall, I would highly recommend VideoReDo and the Suite version if you do not already have a method to create the DVD.

Dave

[gjvrieze]

I too have used Videoredo for years, only wish is for mpeg4/h264 support.....

[Taddeusz]

Originally Posted by gjvrieze

I too have used Videoredo for years, only wish is for mpeg4/h264 support.....

There's a program I came across called H264TS Cutter that seems to do a pretty good job with HD-PVR files.

[Jcage89]

Originally Posted by Taddeusz

There's a program I came across called H264TS Cutter that seems to do a pretty good job with HD-PVR files.

I also have looked at the H264TS cutter for my Hauppauge HDPVR TS files but could not get the streams to open in that utility. I get some sort of bad marker error.

JC

[Taddeusz]

Originally Posted by Jcage89

I also have looked at the H264TS cutter for my Hauppauge HDPVR TS files but could not get the streams to open in that utility. I get some sort of bad marker error.

JC

Weird, the one I wanted to cut opened fine. I was able to cut out the piece of the video I wanted to keep.