Sony Vegas 10 – Clipping without rendering

[John Rofrano]

[John Kurzhals] “Does Sony Vegas have the ability to clip and trim video without rendering?”

Yes, but not AVC. It will “smart render” MPEG2 and DV, but not AVC video.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Christine Neuvil]

I googled

“smart render” OR “smart rendering” “vegas 13” OR “vegas pro 13” mpeg2 dv avc

but could not find relevant results.

[John Rofrano] “[Vegas] will “smart render” MPEG2 and DV, but not AVC video.
“
Is this still correct 6 years later, for Vegas 13?

For MPEG2 and DV, would you recommend using Vegas’ “Smart Rendering” or is other software better at clipping/trimming without rendering?

For formats that Vegas can’t Smart Render, what would you recommend? Preferably free.

I see the original post-er was using Machete and MPEG_Streamclip. (I don’t know either.)

Elsewhere I found:
“To edit a movie without rendering, you have to cut on I-frames. These are approx every 1 sec – so cuts may not be as exact as you want. I use Avidemux for this – despite the name, it will edit mp4, mkv etc. […] With Avidemux, remember to set the output container correctly (to mp4 etc.”

“h.264 is not an all-I-frame codec. That means that the frames are dependant on other frames. This is a problem when you cut it, because you may be trimming off the frames on which it depends. You’ll find that it will have to be at least partially re-encoded no matter what you use.”

“If splitting/cutting all you need, take a look at AVS Video Remaker”

Bonus Q:
The following seems to allow splicing/cutting within the video (not just trimming the ends!!!) and saving without re-rendering:
“If you can script yourself, all you need to do is call FFmpeg repeatedly:
ffmpeg -ss [start-time] -i input.mp4 -c copy -t [clip-time] output.mp4
Here, start and clip times can be in the form HH:MM:SS.mmmm, or just in seconds.
To give you a rough idea how that’d look like in Ruby, see this Gist of mine. It contains a script that takes an edit list, a folder of videos, and cuts them accordingly.”
That’s a reply to a question asking how to batch edit videos. I don’t know if I need to batch edit videos, and using code seems perhaps more complex than I need, but it does enable cutting within the video. Do you know of any other software that enables cutting within the video? Oh! Does Vegas’ Smart Rendering work for cuts within the video, if you have no other kinds of edits and no crossover transitions?

Thanks