I’m going to be doing some cutting and trimming on certain recorded TV shows. I’ve got MCEBuddy and donor versions of Comskip and Showanalyzer Suite which I have used on some TV shows and Movies, but cuts are off alot of the time and want a more accurate way for the new series that I am recording. I done video editing for many years and have some high powered editing software and my own custom designed/built editing system, but it’s overkill for what I really want – Fasts cuts/trims and smart rendering. There are a number of programs available to do this and I have tried half dozen and more. Finally purchased one that I think will do what I want, and maybe more.
Just finished cutting 2 one hour TV shows and it too about 15 minutes in total. When I get going, it will take even less I’m sure. There is a built-in “Commercial Candidate Detector” which I have tried just a bit, but will do more testing with it before making comment.
For any wishing to try their hand at doing some simple cutting, here’s one to try. Just download the trial and give it a shot. You might just like it.
For me it’s worth the 70 bucks. Not that I wouldn’t have like to pay less, but in the editing world, something that does a good job and saves time, the amount this software does, is cheap. Funny, I have both Premiere Pro CC and Sony Vegas 12, which are both fine editors, but neither one will do full smart rendering on these MP4 files cleanly. So, even with my 5 GHz 8 core CPU and nVidia GTX 980 editing system, it takes about 25 minutes to render using CUDA on a 40+ minute TV show with either editor. TMPGEnc does CUDA rendering as well, but it only takes about 1-1/2 minutes to smart render. That is a huge difference. A bit different cutting style, but it’s OK and pretty fast as well. Still playing with the commercial detector. If I can get good enough results with it, it might save a bit of time too.
Sounds like time to get a computer dedicated to nightly download from Tablo, edit commercials, and add plex server to computer and channel to Roku. Maybe change and put the 1 TB back on Tablo and 5 TB on computer with plex server.
I have PLEX on a dedicated Qnap server. Getting pretty full with about 900 DVD/Blu-ray/3D. I’ll have room for about 1500 to 2000 TV shows and perhaps another 500 movies before I’ll have to expand. I’ve been building a Home Theater in the basement since last winter. I’ll get it done over this coming winter I hope. It’s usable now and I do use it could nights a week and more at times. As I said I do video editing, so my editing station is down there as well and I can output in real time to my 12 foot screen and 7.2 dolby as needed during edits. Been wanting the theater for over 10 years, so I am glad to finally getting it done.
Doesn’t help this minute, but a user friendly commercial cutting tool is planned for the next major (2.0) version of SurLaTablo. It’s not that hard, not sure why nobody has done a good free one already.
If you can get automatic or even semi-automatic commercial cutting to work across the spectrum of programming used to insert commercials in to content, you will really have something. The seemingly endless variables that must be in place for this to work, to me, seem it seem unattainable. I almost think it would take an artificial intelligence engine to do it properly in all cases. I think this TMPGEnc software is close, but using the commercial marking tool it is still more time consuming to get commercials out then just quickly scrubbing through the timeline and inserting cut points. Fortunately, the developers of this software took this into account when designing this program and it is really easy and quick to delete commercial content by hand using their interface design. Only real issue is, it still takes my (the end user’s) time to do this. Even at 5 to 7 minutes per 1 hour show, that’s a lot of minutes when you have over a 1,000 shows staring you in the face!
I will tell you again however, both you and your counterpart are so good to be working on getting content off the Tablo and on to our servers/hard disks. I would like to see both of you get rewards for this as you both certainly deserve to get more than “thanks” for all the hard work you have both contributed so freely.
SurLaTablo has two algorithms with lots of tweakables for automatic commercial cutting. The problem is that they are both very error prone. SurLaTablo 2 (when I get around to it) will have a web ui and the ability for a human to turn on off segments displayed in a friendly manner and then it glues and transcodes the pieces together…
Since you simply love spending every free minute on SurLaTablo, here is another idea to consider. I have the ability with my editing system to produce nice 5.1 dolby from stereo. There are a number of software apps and plugins that do this. Many are free as well. How about utilizing some of the opensource out there and do a upmix coversion to 5.1 AC3 while your at it?