videos question

does cutting and merging or sharpening and adding brightness to video's re-encode the video? because i dont want to lose quality of my videos

whats a good freeware program for this?

 

VirtualDub is free and should do what you need and there shouldn't be quality loss with Direct Stream Copy. It can be slightly intimidating to first time users, various guides are available around the web, here's one: http://www.videohelp.com/oldguides/virtualdubedit One thing I found was that videos appeared darker on the computer and really didn't need brightening after burning to DVD, brightening showed more defects too. Starting with high quality video is very important.

 

VirtualDub is a very good app, though it's input/output support is pretty limited.

The one I often use is Avidemux. Supports a lot of input formats, and more output formats than VirtualDub. (There are AviSynth scripts available to supplement VirtualDub, but natively Avidemux is more flexible.)

I don't believe filters can be added when using 'direct stream copy' in VirtualDub, btw. The filter option is greyed out when that is selected, as adding filters would not be 'copying'.

For best results when re-encoding and adding filters (with or without having made edits) use a video bitrate that's around the same or a little below what the video was originally encoded at.

In both VirtualDub and Avidemux, there's a 'preview' option available to see what your filtering is going to look like on the finished product.

If you do your work properly you lose no quality, and sometimes even gain a little.

VirtualDub: http://www.virtualdub.org/

Avidemux: http://fixounet.free.fr/avidemux/

 

i tried windows movie maker but whenever i play the new shorter edit file it shows random color image but you can hear the audio but the video doesnt show only random color image? i tried it with different formats

 

I don't know much about MovieMaker.

You can install this: http://www.headbands.com/gspot/

Use it to open the video file you created with MovieMaker and see if it's listing valid video data.

 

does anyone know a converter that doesnt re-encode the video?

 

No-- because that can't happen. Hence the word "converter", rooted in "convert".

From Merriam-Webster online:

You can copy a video, with or without making edits first.
That can be done with either of the two programs I gave you links to earlier.

The bitrate, aspect ratio, et.al. remains the same in that case. Nor can you add filters when doing that, because that then wouldn't be copying, as already noted.

Can't have your cake and eat it too, in other words.

 

Depending on which windows operating system you are running, you may have more luck trying an earlier version of Movie Maker.

 

i found out why its not working, because i have vista basic