Lossless rendering of edited source clips to re-import for future projects?

[eclipse]

Hi guys,
I've got a bunch of family movies with source clips that I'd like to edit awkward bits out of and render into smallish chunks to re-import later. I KNOW the number one rule is don't edit from anything but source material, as rendering and re-rendering could end up looking like a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy. But is there a way? Because it would be awesome to have all my source clips tidied up into 5 minute chunks to reimport and re-edit around certain themes later on. Like, we might watch our family movies by calendar year - but then for the 21st birthdays I might like to compile a bunch of their birthday scenes together in the one new project.
If anyone is familiar with the iMovie events library, I guess I'm asking for a non-imovie way to do that.
Lossless editing, for future reimporting. Can it be done - hopefully in FOSS?

 

[ColdCase]

Thats what I do with FCP because of its powerful tagging, cataloging, and media management capability. Nothing matches it. I create short projects with the resolution of the original, and pull the part I want from the original, place it and edit it. I then tag it with date, subject, participant type info. It doesn't take up any more storage space as the projects are just pointers to video sources and some text. You can then search on tags later, or browse through them.

I also share some of these small clips on line, but compressed, as disaster mitigation. I run them through subbler to add metadata that media servers can use to organize indexes, like iTunes or Plex.... The kids sometimes get a kick out of watching them when they visit.

There are probably a dozen other ways, some better, to use FCP to manage media as many just tag sections of original media directly. Then assemble and edit later. The subject shows up quite a bit in online tutorials.

I now have near 8TB of home video divided into about 10 libraries based on year. FCP is probably the best organizing tool for this, worthwhile even if you don't use any of the advanced editing features.

 

[eclipse]

I guess I'm moving to Linux in the next while and thought I'd have a last stab asking old contacts here.

But you raise a good point.

Anyone know of ways of tagging files and labelling them with different things? EG: Birthdays, different children, friends, etc. Is there a way to tag these clips by subject - even overlapping subjects (like your child's birthday but also tagged with friends that were there) - for easy collation later on?

 

[ColdCase]

Subler, for one, can add just about any meta data to a video file. I have a couple custom settings defined but lately I've been simply using use the genre and date fields to tag content. I have a genre defined for every tag of interest and just add multiple tags to the video file. So instead of crime, drama, comedy, I have Bob, Susie, Birthday, Holiday genres.

Media servers like iTunes and Plex can read and sort those for you. You probably could write a script the reads meta data , finds those tagged with the thing you want, and then outputs a list of the file names.

With any of these management systems, garbage in is garbage out. It takes some time and effort, more effort with less capable apps. Easy is the key word, but tagging is work.

 

[eclipse]

Hi guys,
I uploaded some files into iMovie from an old DV tape, did the Control Click thing to open up the imovie library and drag the raw footage out, and now LosslessCut won't play the files? It recognises the audio but not the video.

 

[Gwendolini]

What file type were those files your drew out of the library? .dv or .mov?

 

[eclipse]

.mov this time - was there something wrong in the way I reimported my old tape?
I remember it having .dv files.
Or has the system changed preferences since I updated my old old G4 to my 2011 imac?

 

[Gwendolini]

.dv might have been too old to port, since Apple gave up on 32-bit codecs due to the future.
I guess the .mov will use the Apple Intermediate Codec, but I am not so sure about that. Maybe use MediaInfo (free) to have a look inside the details of the resulting files.