Old 02-02-2019, 03:47 AM   #1
Snap
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Default Video editing noob question

Long story (not too) short:

I've never payed attention to Reaper's video editing capabilities (since they were introduced a long time ago)... Until today. Just dropped a clip in, chopped it here and there, rendered it, played it back and... purged Blender right away, LOL.

I don't need a lot from a video editor, I don't shot videos. From time to time I just crop/chop parts/cruft to trim down to the only parts I want from videos I got sent or download. Blender, Shotcut or Kdenlive feel like overkills for my minimal needs. Also Reaper is way smaller and have no ugly dependencies like the other ones. So, yes, Reaper it is. It took me years to realize it! Silly me

Now, the question:

For basic and simple video chopping I used to use ffmpeg shell scripts. Normally using the "-codec copy" option to avoid resampling and reencoding keeping the quality and everything else as is. Is there a way in Reaper to pass the video properties of the current video for rendering a la "codec copy" without needing to manually setting them all every time?

Thanks in advance.
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Old 02-05-2019, 01:45 AM   #2
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That's what I expected... no easy OOTB way for now.

I'm wondering if a lua script would be the way. Yet one more reason to learn lua... I'll have to bump it to the topmost part in my endless todo list for once.
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Old 02-05-2019, 06:25 AM   #3
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I have no idea what you mean with this command line method, but Reaper is definitely not capable of changing video parameters without re-encoding.

As I created a VLC extension for splitting videos with mkvMerge I also had a discussion about if this would be possible from inside Reaper. You also mentioned cutting. And there are some aspects you have to think about. Reapers preview shows every frame as solid image what isn't actually the case. Some codecs use keyframes and interpolate in between. And cutting videos without re-encoding can only be done exactly at a keyframe.
There is the conflict. If you send a timestamp from inside Reaper to a tool like mkvMerge, it can't cut/split exactly at the same frame if it isn't a keyframe. What you get will be a cut at the nearest keyframe which then wouldn't fit exactly back into Reaper or into the time range you had in mind.

Maybe there are lua functions in Reaper which give out the next keyframe. But I have no idea. If yes, this could be used to pre-determine and compute where mkvMerge would split the video.

It would be of course a great addition for Reaper to get the ability to cut and crop videos without re-encoding. Many people asked for that. Some prefer to import a big movie and want to split it down to short sequences. But this needs to be started from someone with coding skills ...

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Old 02-05-2019, 09:08 PM   #4
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I think we're talking about different things. I meant just keeping the original video item properties



into the rendering options



Instead of manually setting them every single time. The same `ffmpeg -codec copy` would do.
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Old 02-05-2019, 11:19 PM   #5
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try the > button beside fps
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Old 02-06-2019, 12:54 AM   #6
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Snap View Post
I think we're talking about different things. I meant just keeping the original video item properties



into the rendering options



Instead of manually setting them every single time. The same `ffmpeg -codec copy` would do.
That is of course the easiest thing you could imagine. Just go into the presets and you will find several source recommendations. Such as resolution, frame rate.

As ReaperBlog's Jon mentioned: Just click on the tiny [ > ] next to fps!

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Old 02-06-2019, 10:52 PM   #7
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Thanks for your replies, guys.

That's exactly what I'm doing. Trying to match the properties manually and precisely the step I'd like to skip; trying to match the so-called ffmpeg's stream copy feature instead of re-encoding. Stream copy is fast and lossless, but it's limited to certain conditions that this basic editing fulfills.

I have no idea if this is possible at all from Reaper, but would be great just for this kind of basic on-the-fly editing scenario; merely cutting parts out from a video clip while leaving everything else as is.

I guess there would be a way to grab the
Code:
ffmpeg -hide_banner -i myvideofile
(or ffprobe) output (what Reaper's video media item shows, though it doesn't hide the banner in this case) and parsing it as the rendering settings via scripting. Don't know if it worths the effort, but trying to achieve it is the fun part, isn't it? I'll keep researching and keep you posted if I find something useable.

Last edited by Snap; 02-06-2019 at 11:33 PM.
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