Best way to produce a trimmed untouched video?

[Vincent Rosati]

Once you have your rough edit, your in/out points are set/trimmed, you should be able to go to Project/Project Manager and check “Create New Trimmed Project” and run the process.
This will result in a new batch of files that are trimmed to the portions that are used in the timelines.
I think this is what you are looking to do?

[Gertret]

Vincent, the way I did it is:
1) Set the In and Out point in the Source Monitor
2) Drag the resulting clip to the Timeline Sequence
3) Set the next In and Out point in the Source Monitor and again drag it to the Timeline Sequence
So repeating this procedure I have 15 clips one after the other joined in the Timeline Sequence. If I do what you suggest I get the original uncut video, not the trimmed one. So now, having the timeline sequence, how do I convert it to the trimmed video? Thanks.

[Vincent Rosati]

Apologies. I ran a test project with uncompressed AVI footage and discovered a sort of “random” result in the trimming, in that the trimmed clips were not numbered in the order that they are in the timeline). But it worked.
Anyway, than I ran a test on an edited MPEG compressed video and it achieved a similar result as what you described – 1 video file.

I haven’t worked with HD and am unfamiliar with the codec, but it appears to have a similar limitation as MPEG-2, regarding trimming??

I’ve used AVS Video Converter to trim MPEG video, but it does recompress the file. Perhaps HD would work in the same way?
Also, QuickTime Pro does a great job at trimming video, but again, I’ve only used it to trim uncompressed DV video.

I’m not sure if I have an acceptable answer to your question, other that to suggest that you encode your timeline to it’s intended format, or decompress the video before trimming. 🙁

[Gertret]

Hi Vincent, let me state as clearly as possible what I’m trying to do. It’s a very basic operation. I have this 39min Mpeg2 HD video I captured with Premiere from my HC3 camcorder. I want to cut certain clips from this video and create a new “cut” video that is 34minutes (so I delete 5min of clips). I do not want to touch the format at all, so no encoding necessary. This should not take too long, as there’s no encoding to a different format. I’ve done this with Pegasys TmpgEnc Mpeg2 Editor in about 20min, but using Premiere the way I described in my previous post it takes more than 7 hours,so I reckoned that I’m not doing it the most efficient way. So my question is, what is the best way to do this using Premiere Pro CS3 in about the same time (or less) than what Tmpgenc spends? Thanks.

[Marc Brak]

As far as I know, mpeg2 is a compressed format meant for viewing, not for editing. So when you export to mpeg2, PPro will always recompress, and you’ll lose quality.

Best option IMO would be to export to “standard” windows DV AVI, with export>movie. You can adjust the settings to export without quality loss.

By the way, why would you choose to shoot mpeg2? Especially when you’re shooting HD? On the one hand you’re going for the extra quality of HD, on the other hand you shoot in a lossy, compressed format.

I’m asking out of curiosity, since i only have experience with regular SD avi.

Anyway, hope this helps, and it shouldn’t take long 😉

[Gertret]

Hi marcbrak, I’m not choosing to shoot in Mpeg2 for the simple reason that the Sony HC3 Camcorder shoots in that format natively (Mpeg2 1080 60i) so when choosing within Premiere’s Media Encoder settings I set the video options to match this format so there’s no reencoding. Choosing the DV AVI format as you suggest would in fact mean reencode to a format different to the source and therefore would mean quality loss.

[Vincent Rosati]

It sounds like you have a good Batch Process workflow with TMPGEnc. 🙂
Otherwise, I agree with marcbrak regarding the usage of MPEG video, and that decompressing your MPEG video to either AVI Uncompressed or MOV Uncompressed would allow you to trim the project as you desire.
You are correct that encoding to DV-AVI is lossy, but uncompressing the video results in a lossless translation, however the files are huge. Generally, the listed codec for uncompressed video reads as “Uncompressed” in the codec options, for both AVI and MOV.
In the future, you might try to capture your video using the Automatic Scene Detect feature, or by manually clipping your footage as you capture – so you’ll have more manageable files if you decide to decompress. Or, many decompression apps will allow you to define maximum file size, so you can split a large file into a series of, say, 1 gigabyte files.

Perhaps someone in the Premiere Pro forum can provide you with an answer that better addresses your needs.