"The easier and cheaper a hobby becomes, the more people expect instant results. Talent, flair and enthusiasm become secondary to having the tools." This gem was came from one of our forum moderators, and it's most certainly true for my favoured past time of video editing. Big budget effects and MTV style editing are often the the first items on a newbies list, but not everyone wants an all singing, all dancing home movie. There's just as many camcorder users happy to simply cobble together a few vidoes. Let's not be a snob about this, "video editing" isn't just about creating a movie masterpiece... sometimes it's as simple as removing adverts from TV shows.
Digital video makes this a seemingly easy task. Surely it's just a case of cutting out the bits you don't need? Unfortunately it's always been a case of either buying fully featured video editing software, or using freeware tools often designed for experienced users. Fully featured software is overkill and, although fantastic, the likes of VirtualDub will confuse the hell out of anyone not interested in learning its features. The wonderfully simple VideoRedo has gained a tremendous following for offering simple cuts with no re-encoding for some time now, but not all of us record in MPEG. Here's where SolveigMM Video Splitter aims to step in.
The claim here is for AVI cutting without recompression. No recompression is a big claim to make: AVI files are often heavily compressed, and recompression results in a marked deteriation in quality. It's worth clarifying here what we mean by an AVI file - a term often used but rarely fully understood. Files labelled with AVI extension are simply video files encoded for playback on a Windows PC. More important than the AVI label is the "codec" used to create the video. This codec (sort for Compression-Decompression) is what used to encode and compress the video for playback. Some codecs such as DivX are extremely lossy and discard a lot of data for compression. If we re-encode a DivX file, we're simply throwing more data away, which will result in worse quality. So you see editing without recompression is a great innovation in terms of reducing quality loss, and dramatically reduces the time spent outputting your files. Compression is a time consuming process. SolveigMM claims to output your file much faster than real time...
So what can you expect from SolveigMM Video Splitter?
SolveigMM Video Splitter is a small download, coming in at just 1.6MB. Featuring a well presented graphical interface, it's easy to navigate around the software and start trimming clips.
The scrollbar underneath the video window lets you job backwards and forwards to find your edit points. To mark an edit point, for example the start of the commercials, simply click the arrow button, or click Ctlr-M. If you're simply deleting the begining or end of clip, it's now just a case of clicking on the portion of the bar you want to remove (it will turn orange with the marker is within the area) and clicking on the "tick" button below the bar or pressing Ctrl-S. You can remove multiple sections by creating a section using the marker, then deleting the unwanted areas:
Areas marked in blue will be included in the video output, areas marked white will be deleted, and the oranage section is the currently highlighted segment. You can also invert your selections. To output your video once you've selected the sections to remove, simply click "trim". A dialogue box will appear and prompt you for a file name. Simply enter your file name and SolveigMM Video Spliter will create your output. Take care here as subsequent clicks of trim will overwrite your initial output.This happens regardless of whether you've loaded another video! If you want to preserve the initial output, you'll have to open up the application again. It's worth noting however that your source video is not ammended in any way!
SolveigMM Video Spliter worked perfectly with DV AVI. The output video was built extremely quickly and browsing through the video was simple. I then tried the splitter with an DivX video and MPEG1 audio. Again SolveigMM Video Spliter performed exactly as promised. It's easy to find edit points, and the original aspect ratio of the video is preserved (although not in the preview window!). I did however have a short 6 second video that although loaded, I couldn't edit. I assume that this is due to limitations of the encode, which may be an indication that precise edits will not always be possible in heavily compressed video. Opening up a 16 second clip, I found that the first step in the video was from 0 secs to 3 seconds, with each subsequent step approximately 1 second. The video details were: 1 Mb, 866 Kbps, 25.0 fps, res. 720*576 (4:3), XVD. Unfortunately SolveigMM Video Spliter does not support WMV or MPEG1 or MPEG2 video.
Due to the nature of AVI files, there's one thing this software won't be able to do and that's join files without recompression. The software is currently in beta and available as a 10-day trial. Until pricing is announced, I can't pass overall judgement, but can confirm that if you're looking to delete commercials from AVI files, this looks to be a winner.
