Efficient way to organized a mixed up Video

CraftyCre8tor wrote on 9/18/2006, 1:28 PM
My project:
My brother converted my parent's old home movies to tape. These movies started in 1949 and ended in the 70's (no sound). I've been given three DV tapes that are each 58 minutes long. Each 58 minute tape has a minimum of 25 events with no breaks. All the events are completely out of order and have no relationship to the tape they are on. My task is to break up all the events (about 75) and put them in order.

My Plan:
I imported all three tapes into VMS and have 3 very large avi files. I'm currently working on the first avi file. I'm running two VMS programs at once. I select an event from the 1st VMS program, copy it and then paste it into the second VMS program, then render it as an avi. When I'm done, I'll have 75 separate avi's that I can put in order and make my movie.

My Question:
Is this the most efficient/fast way to accomplish this? I'm open to any and all suggestions.

Comments

rustier wrote on 9/18/2006, 5:38 PM
I did a project like that. I chose to use trimmer and markers - which I labeled. Then I used an old fashioned pad and pencil to organize the layout and order, including music appropriate to the date running in the background. Then I simply inserted the clips in their appropriate order. The advantage this may have is that you dont have to do all that rendering, just to bring it right back into your project. That and the fact that you may want to minimize the number of renders you do with your stock footage. Of course your way you could set up a file system and organize it that way - but I think my way might save a little time.

Have fun with it! The family will love it. I know my family loved listening to those old hits while watching the "good ole days", it brought back a lot of good memories and conversation.
PaulS wrote on 9/18/2006, 6:09 PM
I recommend using ScenalyzerLive 4.0 which I use for converting all of my old analog video into AVI files. It is able to split up AVI files using optical scene recognition, which sounds like it is what you would want. If it splits your AVI into more files than you want, you can select a group of files to join them. You can download it and try it out before buying. At $39 US, it has easily saved me enough time to be worth it. http://www.scenalyzer.com/main.html

Paul
IanG wrote on 9/19/2006, 1:00 AM
An alternative to Scenalyzer is AVCutty. It does much the same as Scenalyzer but it's "donation ware" - the author suggests $20. You might also like to look at MediaCenter. This is a media organising app, but you can display each clip as a thumbnail, arrange them in the order you want (like storyboarding) and then drop them onto the VMS timeline. You can obviously arrange things directly on the timeline, but I find this approach easier.

Addendum:

I've just had another play with AVCutty - if your plan is to end up with a small number of ordered AVIs it may be able to do the whole thing .

Ian G.