Cut and Voiceover only avi's

[noco1]

Hi

I'm been struggling on how to simply join/cut together some video files in avi format and do only a voiceover, disposing of the sound in the videos themselves.

I did a lot of screen capture videos on my PC using Fox Magic's Screen Virtuoso software.

The resulting AVIs show stunningly clear in Virtual Dub. But when I run through conversion, and try to edit in iMove or Adobe Premier 3, both on the Mac, the results have a low quality output.

I'm thinking that the more conversion and imports I go through the worse things get.

Is there a way to simply edit & join these AVIs, delete the sound and do my voiceover and keep the superb quality I see in Virtual Dub?

I'm a real video newbie and don't have the time to dive into the technological details - hoping there is a really simple solution. I already spent tons of time experimenting on conversions and exports and imports with no success.

Any help appreciated

[admin]

Yes, there's a way, and VirtualDub has pretty much been expressly designed to do simple edits such as what you want.

The trick is to go to the "Video" menu in VirtualDub and select "Direct Stream Copy" - this will allow you to edit the video in VirtualDub without having to re-convert it (which, if the settings are not correct, will mean quality loss). Then from the File menu, select "Save as AVI" to save a new AVI file (don't overwrite your old one).

The same can be done with the audio, and you have the option (from the "Audio" menu) to remove sound altogether.

What I would do is to edit the video first (with sound set to "No Sound"), and then do the voice-over track over this newly edited video (record to MP3), and then open up the edited video (again, select "Direct Stream Copy" for Video) and from the Audio menu, select "Audio from Audio menu). Save again, and that's it.

You can record the audio in WAV and let VirtualDub encode the audio to MP3, but there's no real advantage to that.

[noco1]

Got it

Thanks! I think what threw me was that I have to record and post an audio file for the voiceover. Im used to the voiceover type functionality in iMovie so the recording and loading the mp3 in was a new concept for me.

Thanks for the other advice too!

[jasonbarrett]

Thanks! I think what threw me was that I have to record and post an audio file for the voiceover. Im used to the voiceover type functionality in iMovie so the recording and loading the mp3 in was a new concept for me.

Thanks for the other advice too!

Thansk for the information..