Help with Cutting Large File

[rvdsabu4life]

Some friends of mine agreed to pay me if I taped the "Chappels Show" marathon saturday night and turn it into a DVD. I ran into a problem. I used ATI TV Wonder Pro to capture the file to an MPG. ATI's timer only lets me record up to two hours of video. (I know, "Use different software!" Well other PVRs work but they cannot record video from the card. I always get errors) Anyway, I decided to let it record all night. I stopped the recording about 7am on saturday morning and I had a 30gb file. The problem is now I have no room to edit the file. I think I have 5 gb left.

If I could get the extra 5 hours off the end of the video then I would be alright. I tried virtualdub and used "direct stream copy" so that I wouldn't lose any quality. It came up with an error stating that it is an unknown codec and cannot be done that way. I decided to encode it with xvid, but in order to fit on my computer I had to lower the quality.

Basically I need to get the last 5 hours off the video, remove the commercials, and add menus within about a 5gb margin. Does anyone have any suggestions or software I might try?

[megamachine]

If your video file is an MPEG-2, you can cut it with MPEG2CUT or XPChopper, although I have never tried it with such a large file.

[rvdsabu4life]

yeah it is mpeg-2, but i toyed with the idea of using a splitter to get rid of the ending, but all that is going to do is make another file that is gonna be too big

[megamachine]

With limited HDD space left, I thought you might want to cut some pieces off the large file and store them as 4.3GB chunks on data DVDs, while you are figuring out how you want to assemble the project for your friends. That would at least clean off the HDD, and give you some space for editing and authoring. Or, you could get an external HDD, if you are going to do this often, since they're pretty cheap these days. Another option, though again I'm not sure how it would work with such a large file, is to check out something called ReJig, which enables you to transcode the MPEG-2 to a lower bitrate, thus shrinking the file, but which works much faster than a usual encoding job. The uncertainty for me is whether or not any of these programs will work with a 30GB file, so that's why I recommended cutting it up first. You can also try TMPGEnc DVD Author, which is simple to use. If you can load the MPEG-2 there, you can author the file into DVD-size segments, one at time, and burn each one, thus freeing up the HDD in stages, and eventually you will have created a number of DVDs. Perhaps some combination of the above is the way to go.

[rvdsabu4life]

Indeed it is MPEG-2 video. I must say that splitting the files on a few DVDs is a great idea. I am definately gonna try that. Can you reccomend and good software for ripping the files without making a file over 5gb?

[rvdsabu4life]

Never mind. Me = doesn't read the entire post

[megamachine]

No need to rip anything. All you have to do is either cut it up with MPEG2CUT, into whatever sizes you want, and then save them on data DVDs for storage. Then, you can process each segment into DVD structure with TMPGEnc DVD Author, and burn them as video DVDs. Or, if TMPGEnc DVD Author accepts a 30GB file, you can author it piece by piece. The advantage of cutting it up before authoring is that you can adjust the bitrate with ReJig, to shrink the files down a little more and gain more control over how much of each segment you put on each disk. Let us know how it works.

[megamachine]

P.S. Just to clarify the jargon: "ripping" refers to getting a video off of a DVD, and "authoring" refers to processing your video files so that they can be read by a standard DVD player, which can also include adding menus and chapter points. Hope this helps.