Cander said:
I've tried read through most of the pages here and made a search for a good answer for this probably already asked question: how do I best do simple cut-editing in a video editing program like windows movie maker, render it to a new mp4 without losing quality or making the file bigger?
I'm using the settings suggested in the first post works great, having CBR disabled make really good quality at low output file size. Compressed and ready for the web, but if I need to do after-editing in a video editor, what's the best practice to as least damage to quality/size?
In movie maker, would the solution simply be when exporting to set the video's bitrate the same as the input video's? Or is there more parameters that affect quality/size?
I think you just need to make sure CRF setting is enough to guarantee
transparent quality in the initial save to disk file.
Once that's done, I just recommend my guide post here for the highest quality final output:
https://obsproject.com/forum/viewtopic. ... =70#p48617
You said "simple cut", "without losing quality", and "[without] making the file bigger".
1) Well I'm not sure what you mean by simple cut, but how ever many edits you make really doesn't matter. If you make one or more changes, you're going to have your next item affected.
2) You're going to lose quality any time you edit the .mp4s. Perhaps some program can cut and splice on keyframes and not lose quality, but I'm not familiar with any. Outside of that, any NLE will cause a quality loss by definition (of lossy compression). That's why you want to keep quality high from the initial save through every intermediate step.
3) The method I describe in my link above only makes the end file
potentially no bigger (entirely depending on the quality you tell Handbrake to compress at in the final encode). But the intermediate files, which can be deleted when you're done so you get your hard drive space back, are huge. Even so, if you want a high quality final product, I think its the way to go.
