VirtualDub works great for trimming. It requires VfW codecs, which you'll need to obtain if the video format in the AVI is DV.

http://www.virtualdub.org/

If all you are doing is trimming clips ,no effects, Vegas is not going to have a long render time. Just render as windows avi and have render quality good.
Should be very quick, unless I'm missing something.

Well, its a lot faster than Vegas, but I was hoping for something quicker yet, although that just may not be possible.

With Vegas a 90 minute video took about 3-4 hours to render, with VirtualDub it looks like it will take about an hour, unless I am doing it wrong. I just deleted the end of a clip and chose to Save as AVI... I assume thats the best way to just chop the end off a clip.

Am I missing something, or is about an hour the best I will be able to do?

Thanks!
Pastor Kevin Ingram
Mabel Worship Center AG
www.mabelworshipcenter.com
pastor@mabelworshipcenter.com
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~~~~ Acts 2:38 ~~~~

Select Direct stream copy in the Video menu.

Somewhere between when you drop your AVI onto the timeline and when you render the new, you must be changing something other than just a trim. An effect, a crop, a project size change...something.

Simply trimming a standard AVI and rendering it to a new AVI would not take anywhere near that long in Vegas. What codec does the original AVI use? Is it something like DivX or Xvid?

Rob

If the origional AVI is in ANY type of compression, it will take time no mater what (unless you find a specific editor that can use that codec w/o recompression, but then most likely you'll have to edit on the keyframe, kina like mpeg editig).

direct stream with virtualdub - no mater if the source is highly compressed , will take no time at all ..

and i mean - REALLY fast ..

How can I tell? This is all fairly new to me, learning as we go.

Ok, I did that and that improved it a little, it now is taking 45 minutes for a 90 minute clip.

Is that normal, or do I still have something else wrong?

Pastor Kevin Ingram
Mabel Worship Center AG
www.mabelworshipcenter.com
pastor@mabelworshipcenter.com
===========================
~~~~ Acts 2:38 ~~~~

I selected direct stream in virtualdub, and a 90 minute clip is still taking 45 minutes to save, is that normal? If not, what else should I check?

Pastor Kevin Ingram
Mabel Worship Center AG
www.mabelworshipcenter.com
pastor@mabelworshipcenter.com
===========================
~~~~ Acts 2:38 ~~~~

1/2 RT is pretty good. Why woud you need something faster (but you need a fast CPU too, a slow one wouldn't help).

Oh, just want to save as much time as possible when editing the video. We record several services a week at our church, and the less time we have to invest in each one the better... and I just wanted to make sure we were doing it the best way possible, no sense wasting time just because we're learning : ) If 1/2 of real time is optimal, thats what we will use!

Thanks for all the help!

Pastor Kevin Ingram
Mabel Worship Center AG
www.mabelworshipcenter.com
pastor@mabelworshipcenter.com
===========================
~~~~ Acts 2:38 ~~~~

doing cuts on a 90 minute video with vrtualdub should take about 10 minutes max ...

as long as you have 2 fast hard drives or a raid -- 1 for feed and 1 for source ...

Well, that could be part of the problem, I am using one HD for all the video, both source and destination. Its a fast IDE 130G, nothing special but a decent drive... would it be better to add another one and seperate source and destination - would that cause this big of a difference as I am seeing here, currently a 90 minute file saves in 45 minutes?

Appreciate the input - let me know what you think!

Pastor Kevin Ingram
Mabel Worship Center AG
www.mabelworshipcenter.com
pastor@mabelworshipcenter.com
===========================
~~~~ Acts 2:38 ~~~~

Although my experience with this is limited, too, here's something I learned tonight:

I have 2 HDs, on internal IDE and one external USB. You would ASSUME that doing anything time critical should be done on the internal for performance reasons. Things like previewing worked much better off the internal drive. But I was finding just the opposite when trying to capture video and not drop frames. After a little looking around, I think I came to the right conclusion. Norton Anti-Virus auto protect was enabled on my main(internal) drive and excluded on the external drive. When doing something like previewing, which was all reading and no writing, the checker didn't kick in, so it was faster. For something like capture, that is all writing, it was slowing things down till frames started dropping.

Moral of the story: make sure you don't have stupid background processes messing with your drive when you need to do something time critical. This probably goes without saying for most people here but I figured I'd mention it since it bit me.

Also, I think having two drives is a big plus... read from one and write to the other. I don't know what your budget is, but if you can afford Vegas+DVD, you can probably afford a second HD, and the extra space never hurts with video.

Perhaps the forum experts might have more intelligent and experienced comments on this. Still, I figured I'd share my experience while waiting for that capture I mentioned before to finish... :)

By the way, Vegas is certainly capable of rendering without recompressing. I've noticed it several times with MJPEG video when all I did was put a few transitions between several PICVideo MJPEG clips. Obviously you have to make sure your project properties match your media properties (field order, aspect ratio, resolution, etc.) and you have to choose the same codec (PICVideo MJPEG in my case) for compression. Vegas only re-renders the transitions, but for the unaltered frames Vegas simply does a direct stream copy (VirtualDub terminology) aka smart rendering. This doesn't work with MPEG-2 or DivX or similar formats. The video has to consist of keyframes only.

Pastor,

Why do you want to chop the ends off of the AVI files? Is it just to save disk space? Wouldn’t it be easier to just buy a larger hard drive or capture less? Vegas has a batch capture option where you can mark the in and out points on the tape and then it will rewind the tape and just capture the parts you want. Just an alternate solution to your problem.

Vegas will not re-render AVI’s that are only cuts. It is smart enough to just copy source to target. BUT, you need to tell it to render to the same format as the original AVI. Then it will just do a file copy and you will be constrained only by the speed of your hard drives. So if the original is NTSC DV and you render as NTSC DV, Vegas will just copy source to target (as long as the edits are just cuts like you want to do) If the source is MJPEG from a analog camera and you render as NTSC DV, then Vegas will have to recompress every frame which would explain the long render times you were seeing.

Using VirtualDub direct stream copy will also just copy source to target without having to know the format of the AVI file. As you have seem, a 90 minute AVI takes 45 minutes to copy on a single hard drive,. If you get a second hard drive it should cut that time in half (approx 22 minutes).

If this is not a hard drive space problem, then I would question why do you care if the AVI’s have more information than you’re going to use in your project? Just cut them together on the timeline and render to your final format.

I just mentioning all this to make sure we’re solving the right problem. ;-)

~jr

We want to cut off some AVI files that were mistakenly captured for much too long and certainly were taking too much disk space. When we captured the video the capture was left running long after the video source had ended, resulting in a 5 hour capture for a 90 minute video. We could have just deleted and re-captured it, but I thought there might be some easy way to chop off the unneeded blank space in the file and save it. Obviously the best solution is to better monitor the capture process but thats not always the way it works out. : ) Will also look into the tape control you mentioned in Vegas, that may be handy.

We will try some of your suggestions for copying in Vegas, we are still just beginners learning this software and have a long way to go... It sounds like it may be able to do what we want too, although VirtualDub works well.

Thanks for all your help!