Can anyone suggest software for this little A-V project of mine?

[Syrinx]

Hi everybody. I'm looking for some kind of program that will make it easier for me to synchronize video and audio. I think I should briefly describe the specifics of what I want to do.

I'm a fan of the Alabama football team. As most of you probably know, we recently won our first national championship in seventeen years.

The night of the BCS title game, I jacked an FM radio into my soundcard and recorded the audio of the game from our local, partisan crew. That resulted in a massive, 3.6 GB wave file. I used the LAME encoder to shrink that down to a somewhat more manageable 632 MB mp3. I used the "--nores" option. That makes the file somewhat larger than it otherwise would be, but allows mp3 frames to be independent from each other, thus allowing precise editing at the mp3 frame level.

And then earlier tonight, I finally finished downloading a video file of the game. On dialup, it only took a couple weeks. :)

What I want to do is replace the audio track of the video with our local, partisan broadcast team. (Brooklyn's own Eli Gold!) I figured this would be pretty easy. But the problem is that the audio portion is real-time, and the video version is edited, with all the commercials edited out. I have a pretty good idea of how to do this with mplayer and mencoder. But it would be a terribly tedious and exhausting process.

Does anyone know of a software package that would make the process easier? I pretty much use Linux exclusively, so I would prefer Linux software. But I do have Windows XP installed so that is an option too.

Alternatively, is there somewhere, such as an FCC website, that logs the times and durations of broadcast commercials? I think stations and networks are required to report that information, so is there anywhere I inspect that data?

I hope this request isn't deemed too off-the-wall, and thanks to anyone that offers a suggestion. Indeed, thanks to anyone that read all the way through this post. :)

[Fumesucker]

1. Windows Movie Maker should do what you want to do..

You can separately cut and splice the audio and video portions and move them around to get them synchronized the way you want. The learning curve for WMM is not terribly steep since it's not all that complex anyway.

WMM is part of an XP installation..

If I were going to do this I'd try to break it down to more manageable chunks of video and audio to do the actual editing and then splice it all back together later.. You're really going to be upset if you get a couple of hour game nearly finished editing and then WMM crashes or something..


I'm sure there are Linux packages that will do what you want also but I'm not familiar enough with any to say which ones might do so.

[Syrinx]

3. I might just look into that

I've been looking at Linux video editors, like Cinelerra and Open Movie Editor, and they seem awfully complicated, for this one-off task. Thanks for the suggestion.

[Fumesucker]

6. It also occurs to me that you could just edit out the commercials from the audio..

Using something like Wavosaur or Audacity before you start trying to combine the video and audio..

Wavosaur is only for Win but Audacity is multiplatform.

http://www.wavosaur.com/

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

[Syrinx]

7. I do have audacity installed

I've played around with it a little. It seems pretty intuitive and straighforward. Much more so than the video editors I've tried. With those, it seems like I need a three-month course just to understand how to use them. Kind of like Blender for ray-tracing, they're extremely counter-intuitive. But, technically speaking, I guess I have until September to get this task done. :)

[Duer 157099]

2. I'm not exactly sure of what you're asking

Are you asking how to edit out the commercials easily? If so, I don't know the answer specifically, but I'd probably just use an audio editing program and look for the "cues" that indicate a commercial beginning/ending (if they exist). Also sometimes just looking at the waveform will show you where these points are (eg, volume increases, etc). But then, this sounds like what you already know that would be labor intensive.

I use a program called MP3DirectCut for editing audio

http://www.snapfiles.com/get/mp3directcut.html

Here's a good resource page:

http://www.gromkov.com/faq.html

[Syrinx]

4. thanks!

Yeah, I want to cut the commercials out of the radio broadcast so that I can sync it up with the video. I'm beginning to think maybe I should just ask around for a copy of the video with commercials intact. But the video I have is really nice HD, plus I spent two weeks getting it downloaded. :(

Thanks for the input.

[RoyGBiv]

5. Kino ...

http://www.kinodv.org/

It's basically a front-end for mplayer and mencoder (and ffmpeg, transcode, etc.), and it's not nearly as complex as Cinerella.

OnEdit: What you're doing is going to take an enormous amount of hard drive space. To edit the video and add a new audio track, you'll have to decompress it, which Kino will do when you go to import it. I don't have any clue how much space it will take to do this with an HD stream as long as that. I've loaded 5 minute DivX encoded clips that consumed over a gig when decompressed.

[Syrinx]

8. sounds like I should look at Kino

I was on the verge of trying to mock up a simple wxWidgets program that would give a gui into mplayer and mencoder, but I don't want to reinvent the wheel. I figured there simply must be a way to do what I want to do. It's seems like a fairly simply job.

I've currently got about 836 GB of free disk space. If that's not enough, maybe I can divide the original file into chunks and operate on those.

Definitely going to check out Kino. Thanks for the suggestion!

[Syrinx]

9. Cinelerra isn't that hard after all

After I finally figured out how to load files into it, the editing process is fairly straightforward.

I've got all the sections cut up and synced. All that's left is to load up the clips, insert some simple transitions, and render the final file. Maybe after I do that, I'll do the whole thing over from scratch. I'd probably do a better job, with a little bit of experience under my belt.

Cinelerra is a really cool program, but it crashes a lot! I'm tempted to try to write a similar editor myself. It doesn't really seem that complicated. All that it is really doing, in the manner I'm using it anyway, is keeping a record of source files, edits, and transitions in a xml file. And then rendering with gstreamer, I think. Maybe I could make a frontend editor using mencoder. Or at least put that on my infinite TO-DO list. :)

[RoyGBiv]

10. Once you've written it ...

I want to be a tester. :)

Hell, I've tested everything else, it seems. Kino still does most of what I need, so I've stuck with that.

Cinelerra is really powerful, but as you discovered, is about as complicated as you make it. It's just that for smaller projects, it's a bit of overkill.

I generally don't use it because my projects don't usually need all that and because of the crashing problem. Nothing makes me crazier than being 99% through a render of something long and then lose it all in a crash.

[Syrinx]

11. If I ever do that, you will be the first to know

Don't hold your breath though. :D

(Though, really, it doesn't seem that complicated.)

I don't remember the details, but I could never get Kino to work at all on my Ubuntu machine. Maybe I will try again soon. I still have it installed.

I do like the fact that Cinelerra saves every action into the backup xml. But I've still managed to shoot myself in the foot when I've had a crash. Just the learning curve, I guess.