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Poster:	rgs_uk	Date:	October 12, 2004 03:14:57pm
Forum:	movies	Subject:	Re: how best to edit downloaded mpeg2 files with Premiere Pro, etc?

MPEG2 is not a great format for editing due to the way the compression works. Each frame depends on the frames that come before and after it. The frames are gathered together in groups known as GOPS. Cutting into a GOP can cause problems.

I'm not sure how Premiere Pro works with MPEG2. I think it is likely that it recompresses all the footage again when you save the final edited movie. Recompressing causes loss of image quality. Whereas, with an AVI, Premiere only recompresses frames that have been changed (titles or transitions added for example). It 'direct streams' the other frames, in other words no change is made to them.

If you are happy with simple edits then a good tool is Womble MPEG-VCR. Ignore the quirky name and interface, this is great software that really works.

The advantage is that Womble only recompresses the absolute minimum number of frames surrounding edit points. So as much image quality as possible is retained.

VirtualDub MPEG2 (a modified version of the free program VirtualDub) is another good tool for handling MPEG2 -- specifically for converting it to AVI format and a video compression codec of your choice (such as MJPG, HUFFYUV or even uncompressed). Converting to AVI, editing and then recoding back to MPEG2 will mean some loss of quality. However, there are many free pro-quality filters available for VirtualDub which will let you remove noise and 'blocks', tweak colour, contrast and brightness and much more. This can make a huge difference to the finished result.

VirtualDub will not encode it back to MPEG2, you will have to 'frameserve' from VirtualDub to an MPEG2 encoder.

I really think Womble is your best bet.



This post was modified by rgs_uk on 2004-10-12 22:14:57