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Next project: Turning a movie that's dear to my heart into something profane and absurd. I'm going to give Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon the Tiger Lily treatment via subtitles.
The bulk of my efforts will go to creating what I hope will be entertaining subs, but first, I need to pare down the running time, preferably with free tools. I want to keep the editing simple--i.e., without having to edit audio--so the cuts occur when there's no music playing in the background.
Here's been my trial-and-error experience so far:
Source: an HD, 1920 x 800 mkv file, 2.77GB in size on OS 10.4.11 (2.98GB per Snow Leopard). Doesnât play properly in QuickTime, but plays just dandily via MPlayer and VLC; also looks smashing on my Samsung TV. C'mon, Appleâget with it.
Tried loading the mkv file into MPEG Streamclip (MPEGSC), which pleaded no contest to file type, but then proceeded to load the file anyway, albeit with the time markers all incorrect. Also, when playing back video, only a second of audio could be heard, then there was silence. Every time the video was paused and resumed, about a second of audio would play. No biggie. Most important, I could still edit video by identifying scene start and end frames, and Streamclip was superstableâI hadn't a single crash.
One of the idiosyncrasies of MPEGSC: when selecting a clip to cut, the first frame (IN) to select is obvious. However, selecting the last frame (OUT) of the selection will leave that last frame untouched; one has to select the following frame to remove the desired clip in its entirety.
In preferences, I opted to have only one audio track exported; I have no need for the English soundtrack.
Once I edited out about 26 minutes from the mkv file, I was ready to export the result to mp4. The time markers, though, indicate the movie is about 5:13:40 long, when it should only be about 94 minutes. That won't bother me if the encoding comes out straight. (Both Perian and MPEGSC inhabit the same hard drive, but they obviously aren't playing in the same sandbox.)
Still waiting on the encode. As I chronicle this, I'm almost 24 hours into the encoding on my iMac, but the dialogue box says I'm only 63% of the way there. That means it'll take about 36 fucking hours to complete the encoding, assuming there's no second pass. Perhaps I should've chosen a lower file target size. (I went with ~8GB, since the lower file sizes had ridiculously low bit rates for an HD file, though in retrospect the bit rate might have been declared low because of the time marker goofiness.)
While awaiting the MPEGSC encoding, I did some research and found that QuickTime and Handbrake could export MKV to mp4, and neither would take that long. Quicktime could also perform simple cuts. On the MacBook Pro, I now have Handbrake cooking up an encode (target 3.6GB = ~3900 kbps for video; 6-channel surround was reduced to 256 kbps Dolby Prologic II, in case 6-channel surround was gumming up the QuickTime playback), and the conversion will take about five hoursâa burp and a fart compared to the MPEG Streamclip grind. If the MPEGSC export turns out damaged (e.g., extra frames, persistence of goofy time markers, etc.), then I'll simply use the Handbrake-generated mp4 file for editing.
The HB encoding target of 3.6GB is obviously larger than the source file, but by shooting for a larger file size, I'll hopefully have very little loss in resolution from the mkv file. (Loss of resolution from original Blu-ray to mkv is a different matter, but I'm content to work with HD liteâbeats standard def any day.) Also, the 3.6GB size falls under that narsty, narsty 4GB limit for MS-DOS formatted hard drives and memory cards.
Whether I work with an 8GB or 3.6GB file, my plan is to have the final encode (with burnt-in subtitles) weigh in at a reasonable 2 to 2.5GB.
The bulk of my efforts will go to creating what I hope will be entertaining subs, but first, I need to pare down the running time, preferably with free tools. I want to keep the editing simple--i.e., without having to edit audio--so the cuts occur when there's no music playing in the background.
Here's been my trial-and-error experience so far:
Source: an HD, 1920 x 800 mkv file, 2.77GB in size on OS 10.4.11 (2.98GB per Snow Leopard). Doesnât play properly in QuickTime, but plays just dandily via MPlayer and VLC; also looks smashing on my Samsung TV. C'mon, Appleâget with it.
Tried loading the mkv file into MPEG Streamclip (MPEGSC), which pleaded no contest to file type, but then proceeded to load the file anyway, albeit with the time markers all incorrect. Also, when playing back video, only a second of audio could be heard, then there was silence. Every time the video was paused and resumed, about a second of audio would play. No biggie. Most important, I could still edit video by identifying scene start and end frames, and Streamclip was superstableâI hadn't a single crash.
One of the idiosyncrasies of MPEGSC: when selecting a clip to cut, the first frame (IN) to select is obvious. However, selecting the last frame (OUT) of the selection will leave that last frame untouched; one has to select the following frame to remove the desired clip in its entirety.
In preferences, I opted to have only one audio track exported; I have no need for the English soundtrack.
Once I edited out about 26 minutes from the mkv file, I was ready to export the result to mp4. The time markers, though, indicate the movie is about 5:13:40 long, when it should only be about 94 minutes. That won't bother me if the encoding comes out straight. (Both Perian and MPEGSC inhabit the same hard drive, but they obviously aren't playing in the same sandbox.)
Still waiting on the encode. As I chronicle this, I'm almost 24 hours into the encoding on my iMac, but the dialogue box says I'm only 63% of the way there. That means it'll take about 36 fucking hours to complete the encoding, assuming there's no second pass. Perhaps I should've chosen a lower file target size. (I went with ~8GB, since the lower file sizes had ridiculously low bit rates for an HD file, though in retrospect the bit rate might have been declared low because of the time marker goofiness.)
While awaiting the MPEGSC encoding, I did some research and found that QuickTime and Handbrake could export MKV to mp4, and neither would take that long. Quicktime could also perform simple cuts. On the MacBook Pro, I now have Handbrake cooking up an encode (target 3.6GB = ~3900 kbps for video; 6-channel surround was reduced to 256 kbps Dolby Prologic II, in case 6-channel surround was gumming up the QuickTime playback), and the conversion will take about five hoursâa burp and a fart compared to the MPEG Streamclip grind. If the MPEGSC export turns out damaged (e.g., extra frames, persistence of goofy time markers, etc.), then I'll simply use the Handbrake-generated mp4 file for editing.
The HB encoding target of 3.6GB is obviously larger than the source file, but by shooting for a larger file size, I'll hopefully have very little loss in resolution from the mkv file. (Loss of resolution from original Blu-ray to mkv is a different matter, but I'm content to work with HD liteâbeats standard def any day.) Also, the 3.6GB size falls under that narsty, narsty 4GB limit for MS-DOS formatted hard drives and memory cards.
Whether I work with an 8GB or 3.6GB file, my plan is to have the final encode (with burnt-in subtitles) weigh in at a reasonable 2 to 2.5GB.