I am looking for some help with editing.

[walpola]

Hello all

My JAV collection is starting to get pretty big, which I wouldn't normally mind but a lot of it is of scenes I do not want to keep but have to because they are part of a whole video which contains one or two scenes I do want to keep.

What I want to do is edit these videos, simply trim off the parts I do not want and end up with a video clip, reduced relatively in size, containing only the scene or scenes I want while maintaining the same quality as the original.

I have run into some trouble with this however, attempting to use Windows Movie Maker has presented me with two problems. The first one is that although I can watch these movies fine in all players, whenever I open them in Movie Maker I just get a blank screen so cannot see what I am editing. The second problem is that on the rare occasion that one of these videos is viewable in Movie Maker I have edited the video as I wanted to do but ended up with a video file size far larger than the original even though it is trimmed and shorter.

In a nutshell I do not know what I am doing. I know the first answer will be "codecs" but so I'm clear up front I do not really understand this and have installed a codec pack I read about on some forum that had no effect.

So, please kind users of Akiba, offer me some assistance. As an example I have an AVI file that is 995 MB in size, I want to trim about a third of that off so I am expecting a finished file of about 300 MB to 400 MB at the same quality as the original. This is a big ask but if someone wouldn't mind walking me through the process, explaining it to me assuming I am a novice, I would appreciate it.

Many thanks for your consideration.

 

[SamKook]

To achieve what you want you need a software that won't re-encode the video after you edit it(this is why you got a bigger size with Windows Movie Maker).

Since you don't want to re-encode(and you're right not to since you'd lose quality) and simply cut it, it's more about the container than the codec.
The container correspond to the file extention of the video(99% of the time at least, unless it has been manually changed) and you need the right software to edit that container.

Ideally you'd select the best tool for the specific container you're working with, but to keep things simple and since most people aren't as picky as I am, I'll suggest you use avidemux for everything since I think it can pretty much load anything, it's easy to use and it's pretty good at what it does(and what I'd use for .avi anyway).

Open the video you want to edit with it, make sure video and audio on the left is set to copy and choose the format(container) for the resulting file(try to keep it the same as the original as much as possible).

Now for the editing part: the A button in the bottom toolbar mark the beginning of a selection and the B one mark the end. You can then press the delete key on your keyboard to remove that selection and keep the rest of the video. So repeat that process until you're left with only what you want to keep.
There's a multitude of ways to move through the video at the bottom so try them and use the ones you prefer. You can also move frame by frame with the left/right arrows on your keyboard.

To save the video, select File -> save -> save video, press the save icon or use ctrl+s.

This should get you started and if you need more help, don't hesitate to ask

 

[walpola]

Amazing! I did exactly as you said and got exactly what I wanted, many thanks indeed!