Try Editing My Second Life Machinima (AVI) – VisualDub (Part 2)

In my last post about trying some tools to record some Second Life home movies or machinima. I used Second Life to create an AVI movie file. In this article I will show you my first attempts at editing that file using VisualDub. – DV

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When I created my Second Life home video I noticed that it was really raw. The whole Second Life screen was visible in my movie, the file was very big, and the movement of the movie was jerky. Because my video work needs some practice, when I turned the camera I stayed longer in some frames and not others. So what I wanted to be able to do was:

1. Edit the video so I could crop out parts of the video
2. Edit the video so I could edit out frames of the video

The first free tool I found for the job was actually pretty good. The tool is called Solveig Multimedia AVI Trimmer. This product was free and it allowed to edit easily cut frames out of the video. This did not provide functionality for cropping the video, so it wasn’t exactly what I wanted.

I ran into a free piece of software that is actually open source. Now we are cooking. The video editing program is called VisualDub. This product allowed me to both crop the video as well as edit the frames out of the video.

Here is a screen shot of VisualDub showing me cropping the original video (to the left) to removing the bottom and top menus from the movie.

By cropping my image, I also reduced the movie file size from 737 MB to 273 MB. By removing unwanted frames, and cropping a touch further I reduced the size of the file once again to 91 MB.

I learned how to do this basic editing within a half an hour with a tool I had never used. I did have to figure out how to use the filters and use the crop feature, but it went fairly quickly.

This tool also appears to have the feature of adding sound to the video clip built in. In part 3, and the last of this series, I will see if I can add some sound to my AVI file using the VisualDub tool. – DV

Articles that may interest you:

Other tools that I have tried

What Hardware and OS is Dharma V. Using?

Download the Solveig Multimedia AVI Trimmer

Learn about and download VisualDub