Combining raw movie clips

There are lots of open source software, that can be used to combine a series of raw movie clips from a digital camera into a single compressed movie clip. A simple solution is to use the command line movie encoder mencoder.

In this example, we want to combine three raw movie clips, 1.avi, 2.avi and 3.avi, into a single compressed movie clip x.avi. Note, that the audio track is copied, which means, that the audio format and sample rates must be the same for all movie clips.

mencoder -forceidx -oac copy -ovc xvid -xvidencopts bitrate=3000 -o x.avi 1.avi 2.avi 3.avi

In this example, clip 1 will be half speed (slow), clip 2 will be double speed (fast) and clip 3 will be normal speed. Because of the different speeds, audio must be encoded as well. Because of the half speed for part 1, the sample rate for the audio is reduced. In this case, the original sample rate of 44,1 kHz per channel is reduced by a half to 22,05 kHz per channel.

mencoder -forceidx -oac mp3lame -srate 22050 -ovc xvid -xvidencopts bitrate=3000 -o x.avi 1.avi -speed .5 2.avi -speed 2 3.avi


In this example, watermarking is prepared by using the subtitle format SubRip and then hardcoded into the encoded movie.

vi w.srt
1
00:00:01,000 --> 00:00:05,000
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www.foobar.com

mencoder -forceidx -oac copy -ovc xvid -xvidencopts bitrate=3000 -sub w.srt -o x.avi 1.avi

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