efficient way of trimming clips
 

I have many clips that contain large sections of not-needed footage, which I want to trim out BEFORE importing them into Movie Studio (so that the entire project takes less GB). I can do it in the camcorder, but it's quite tedious. It would be easier to do it on the computer. Can it be done in Movie Studio without rendering, and without loosing the bitrate? My clips are recorder in 24Mbps AVCHD. Suggestions?
thanks.

Hi Stanley, I'm not aware of any way to shorten your AVCHD clips without rendering. Maybe someone can correct me if Im wrong.
sorry.

hrm...

Your not really "importing" them in the sense I think you are meaning. You are importing references to the actual files. Your project will only be as big as the portions of the clips you use. You can trim them in Movie studio and when you render that is how big the project will be.

thanks, but:
I want to keep my projects, so that I can edit them in a distant future. I could just save the final rendered clips, and import them into a new project, but each time I make a new project out of the clips rendered in Movie Studio (compressed as AVCHD), I loose in quality. After several such iterations, the compression effects will probably show up quite a bit.
Although it is references to video clips that projects use, I can't save such projects without keeping the entire original clips. But this is a lot of GB, and about 75% of them is entirely useless for me.
Looks like I have to think over my work-flow.

...please ignore this reply...

You can use ffmpeg to copy the video/audio stream from a set beginning point and a set end point without any compression or loss of quality. Say you have a 2 min clip and you only need lets say from 15 seconds in to 45 seconds, you can easily do this with ffmpeg to extract the 30 seconds you need.
heres an example that can be placed into a .bat file that will copy the stream for you
you can set the file extension to match the type of output you desire.

ffmpeg -ss 00:01:00:15 -t 00:00:5:00 -i T:\GOPR0033.mp4 -vcodec copy -acodec copy T:\output.mp4

thanks.
So I installed ffmpeg, but got errors upon running your script (see below).
I'll have to figure out how to deal with this.

In any way, is there a gui for ffmpeg, so that I could select the frames visually in one step?
thanks.



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c:\Users\stanley\Downloads\ffmpeg-latest-mingw32-static\bin>ffmpeg -ss 00:00:00:
10 -t 00:00:00:02 -i 00129.mts -vcodec copy -acodec copy output.mts
FFmpeg version SVN-r22941, Copyright (c) 2000-2010 the FFmpeg developers
built on Apr 22 2010 06:10:12 with gcc 4.4.2
configuration: --enable-memalign-hack --cross-prefix=i686-mingw32- --cc=ccache
-i686-mingw32-gcc --arch=i686 --target-os=mingw32 --enable-runtime-cpudetect --e
nable-avisynth --enable-gpl --enable-version3 --enable-bzlib --enable-libgsm --e
nable-libfaad --enable-pthreads --enable-libvorbis --enable-libtheora --enable-l
ibspeex --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libopenjpeg --enable-libxvid --enable-libsc
hroedinger --enable-libx264 --enable-libopencore_amrwb --enable-libopencore_amrn
b
libavutil 50.14. 0 / 50.14. 0
libavcodec 52.66. 0 / 52.66. 0
libavformat 52.61. 0 / 52.61. 0
libavdevice 52. 2. 0 / 52. 2. 0
libswscale 0.10. 0 / 0.10. 0
[mpegts @ 016abeb0]MAX_READ_SIZE:5000000 reached

Seems stream 0 codec frame rate differs from container frame rate: 59.94 (60000/
1001) -> 59.94 (60000/1001)
Input #0, mpegts, from '00129.mts':
Duration: 00:00:14.01, start: 0.432300, bitrate: 24040 kb/s
Program 1
Stream #0.0[0x1011]: Video: h264, yuv420p, 1920x1080 [PAR 1:1 DAR 16:9], 59.
96 fps, 59.94 tbr, 90k tbn, 59.94 tbc
Stream #0.1[0x1100]: Audio: ac3, 48000 Hz, stereo, s16, 256 kb/s
Unable to find a suitable output format for 'output.mts'
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Use Virtual Dub instead, you can save in and out markers in it as well and save to .avi.

I believe MPEG Streamclip can also do lossless in/out points.