Saturday 13 December 2003

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How do I delete frames from a movie?

You've probably gathered by now that I'm quite fond of Virtual Dub. Unsurprisingly this is the program I'm going to recommend you use here too. Run the program and open the movie you wish to edit. Use the tracking slider bar to locate the start of the scenes or frames you would like to delete, click on the 'edit' menu and choose the 'set selection start' option to place a marker on the slider bar.

Now repeat the process to find the end of the scene or frames you would like to delete, but this time select the 'set selection end' command from the 'edit' menu to place a second marker on the slider bar. The segment of the movie you intend to delete will become highlighted on the slider bar - this can now be cut out using the delete key on your keyboard or by selecting 'delete selection' from the 'edit' menu.

All that remains to be done now is to save the movie as a new file. In order to do this you first have to decide which video and audio codecs you would like to use to encode the movie (if you do not choose to compress it you will end up with a file so cumbersome that it becomes useless). Codec selections can be made by choosing the 'compression' option from the 'video' and 'audio' menus. If you select 'direct stream copy' from the 'video' and 'audio' menus before commencing you can save a lot of time. The final step is to select 'save AVI' from the 'file' menu, choose a filename and location to store the file and press OK.

Note that we saved the edited version of the movie as a new file just in case our changes didn't go according to plan and we needed to revert back to the original copy. Also, it is very likely that trying to overwrite the original file while it is being accessed by Virtual Dub will fail, or worse still, result in file corruption.

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