Lossless editing of hd1000 material

[Olas Polare]

Hi
just got my hd1000, and in quite happy with it, but the bitrate is just a little to low for my taste, and i dont think it survives a re-encode very well.. so...

other than the in-camera editing, does anyone know if theres any NLE that will do lossless editing of these mp4 files?

[Kenneth Medin]

Originally Posted by Olas Polare

Hi
just got my hd1000, and in quite happy with it, but the bitrate is just a little to low for my taste, and i dont think it survives a re-encode very well.. so...

other than the in-camera editing, does anyone know if theres any NLE that will do lossless editing of these mp4 files?

I'm using the older Hd1a but I think this will work with the h264 video from the Hd1000 as well:

Install "Haali Media Splitter", "Ffdshow"and "Avisynth 2.57" . They will make it possible to open the MP4 files in AviSynth with the simple .AVS file:

Directshowsource("AnyFileName.MP4")

You write it yourself with Notepad as Avisynth has no interface but works with scripts. It is btw. a rather competent NLE with lots of interesting plugins available. I use it for most of my editing. Video editing in Notepad may seem akward at first but when you have written a few scripts it's mostly a copy and paste job.

I use Virtualdub as frontend for Avisynth (opens the .AVS scripts as a video file). Virtualdub needs codecs to encode the video. For intermediate files I use Lagarith (losseless) or Xvid/DivX in unconstrained mode (almost lossless and smaller files). The rather large lossless .AVI file can finally be reencoded with Virtualdub or other similar apps.

With this method you will have to reencode the video only once to get the final product in 2-pass Xvid or h264. And also note that if you don't need any Virtualdub filters when editing (they only work in RGB) there are no colour conversions to and from RGB in contrary to most commercial solutions.

I have some problems with the AAC Audio. It does not get recognized by Avisynth allthough it should as I have Ffdshow setup. For now I use "Mp4Cam2AVI" to extract the audio to WAV.

I mostly use a separate fieldrecorder (Zoom H2) that records in 4 channels that I feed into Avisynth to get a 5.1 surround WAV file. The camera audio is only used to trim the H2 WAV's for lip sync. Finally the 5.1 WAV is fed to the Aften AC3 encoder to get an AC3 audio file that can be muxed with the video with VirtualdubMod.

All this can for example end up in a 720x400 DivX video with Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound that will play in any DivX certified DVD-player or a HD 1280x720 23.976 fps (from 29.97 original with motion estimation a la Twixtor with the Avisynth plugin MVTools) like this:

http://www.vimeo.com/863627

All software is freeware (except DivX if you prefer that to XVid).

[Olas Polare]

Tjena Kenneth!

Thanks for your extensive answer, but it didnt actually answer the question since the output from the avisynth script will have to be re-encoded.
also editing in a text editor is not really an option if you want to do anything beyond merge a few clips.

if no solution presents itself, i might have to resort to writing some kind of script that will take an EDL from an editing app, and then use a muxer like mp4box to cut and merge the whole thing together, tho it will take a bit of work..

[Kenneth Medin]

Originally Posted by Olas Polare

Tjena Kenneth!

Thanks for your extensive answer, but it didnt actually answer the question since the output from the avisynth script will have to be re-encoded.

If you don't mind the AVI container you can let Mp4Cam2AVI convert it with audio decoded to WAV and use Virtualdub to cut at keyframes in "Direct stream copy" mode. Just tested with a 1280x720 @ 60 fps video from a Hd1000 and it worked great. Note however that at least older versions of Mp4Cam2AVI choked on file lengths over 2 GB.

A quick and lossless solution, but AVI is not at all ideal for h264 video...

also editing in a text editor is not really an option if you want to do anything beyond merge a few clips.

My longest video sofar built on short clips is over 48 min and edited with Avisynth... The trick is to use several scripts and run them from a "master script".

if no solution presents itself, i might have to resort to writing some kind of script that will take an EDL from an editing app, and then use a muxer like mp4box to cut and merge the whole thing together, tho it will take a bit of work..

If you want to stay within a MP4 container that might be a good solution.

But, I'm not shure you have a reason to be afraid of a single reencode just because the original material suffers from various encoding degrations. At equal bitrates a video with more detail would suffer the most.

On the contrary, you might get a better looking result by applying some filters, deblockers perhaps...