Can I merge/join video (.mpg) clips?

[Pete Moss]

I took several short (10-30 second) video clips using my P&S camera. I now have 4-5 .mpg files (5-10 MB each). They are all of the same activity.

Is there a way that I can join them end to end into a single video clip?

It would also be handy to be able to edit out a few sections.

Or is this something I need a specialized video editor for? If so, recommendations?

[stefan]

Hi,

moved to the "off-topic" category.

You can use the Windows Movie Maker for that, for example.

There's also a movie creator available from the great video lan project, called VideoLAN Movie Creator:

http://trac.videolan.org/vlmc/

See screenshots:

http://trac.videolan.org/vlmc/wiki/Screenshots

steve

[peterkob]

Windows/Live Movie Maker and VirtualDub are free and great. Lightworks is a fully featured free video editing software.

[Pete Moss]

Thanks for the suggestions Peter.

I tried Windows Movie Maker some time ago and had a lot of trouble with it. I don't recall the details. I seem to recall a lot of problems with missing codecs or something like that.

Have you used any of these programs? Can you recommend one as best for a casual and occasional user?

[j7n]

MPEG-1/2 files with exactly the same paramenters (picture size, frame rate, audio channels, audio compression) can be joined by appending them to each other using a file manager.

If you need further editing, I can recommend AviSynth v2.5, which I have personally used, in combination with DGIndex, VirtualDub and Xvid.

The learning curve for these tools is steep and might no be for you. I just share my experience in the area. You have to write a short script similar to programming. The good news is that, once you've done it, you can then process other files the same way much quicker. These tools are good and scale well up to HD cinema applications.

[Sprintdriver]

Avidemux should also be a suitable tool for this task.

[Jaff]

VirtualDub