VideoReDo brings fast MPEG1/2 video chopping

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Product name: VideoReDo
Version tested: 1.6.3 build 287
Platform: 32-bit Windows
Price: $49.99 USD
Company: DRD Systems, Inc

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You must be tired of hearing about how dead VHS tapes and video cassette recorders are. We have even explained everything you might want to know about home DVD recorders. But what will you do when you decide to "edit the crop out" of that huge amount of video content you might be adding weekly, if not daily, to your collection? That's why I'd like to introduce you to a small, simple, to-the-point MPEG1 and MPEG2 digital video editor for Windows that is a hidden gem and which has been a lifesaver for me recently: VideoReDo from DRD Systems.

VideoRedo Main Window

This program can be used to remove commercials and other annoying video segments from your raw digital video footage, recorded TV programmes, anything in MPG format. It even features a "Joiner" which can combine several segments into a single video with drag-and-drop simplicity. "Hey this is nothing new there are scores of video editors and similar tools out there!", I hear the choir of parrots saying.

And the parrots are right: There are dozens, if not hundreds of editors, ranging from cheap non accurate avi cutters to expensive, bloated commercial applications that suck the life out of your computer. But the main problem with frame accurate traditional video editors is that after simple changes and cutting, when you need to save your finished project, video must be "re-encoded" completely, to maintain the integrity of the MPEG stream on the file, which needless to say is a CPU and time intensive process.

Cutting, chopping, joining little pieces

VideoReDo avoids that by using a method dubbed "fast frame copy". Instead of loading the whole giant video file into RAM like other editors, you just browse the video file, moving back and forth and selecting "cut points" of the segments that you want to remove or keep, and when you're done the program does a "frame-copy" from the original file to the destination file. A disk-intensive but not CPU intensive task, which ends up being much faster than the traditional "re-encoding" process. How fast? Suffice it to say that to cut a 187MB, 4 minute video segment out of a 496MB dvd-quality MPEG2 clip, the program took around... 32 seconds. Those who have waited for re-encoding know how slow things can get with "re-encoding-happy" video editors.

Saving segments cut quickly by using "Fast Frame Copy"

The program can operate in "Cut mode" or "Scene Mode". In Cut Mode, you select parts of the video file that you wish to remove - like commercials. In "Scene Mode" what you select are the portions of the video file that you intend to keep. The working mode can be changed from the program's "General Settings" in Tools->Options. The program also takes into account the characteristics of MPEG2 files captured using Tivo and ReplayTV units, and if you regularly work with those kind of source files, the program can be configured to use two times more RAM to work more efficiently with MPEG2 streams with large GOP (which stands for "Groups of Pictures", not the GOP as in the U.S. Republican Party, as Americans might suspect.

Not only you can use this to extract favourite scenes (for posting on the web, e-mailing, you name it) from your digitised VHS collection or DVDs ripped to hard disk, but it's also useful to edit those raw tv recordings made with stand-alone DVD recorders. There's a FAQ section dedicated to that process.

Installation was a no-brainer. Download size is small, and after the program is installed it takes slightly over 4MB of HD space distributed between a single 1.5MB executable file and a handful DLLs, that's it. No messy installation, no reboots, no huge libraries required. I wish all Windows software was like this.

Usability, they've heard of it
This program should win a prize for usability. Being a keyboard freak, this program grew on me with its dozen of easy to remember and intuitive hot keys. For instance: You can use the space bar to toggle between playback and pause mode. There are other keyboard shortcuts like pressing [M] which mutes audio for quiet unnoticed editing. The program surprised me by following the ancient yet useful CUA91 guidelines meaning that if you press "F1" you get "Help" on every screen and dialogue. Navigating a video file is as simple as using the mouse to click on the video timeline, the keyboard (arrow keys) for small increments, page up/down keys for larger jumps, or even the mouse wheel. You can use the shift key and click to select a range of cuts from the scene list (shift-click on first, repeat the process on the last) or use the Ctrl key to click and select multiple separate cuts. Edits can be done one-by-one of "queued" by pressing CTRL-B for "batch processing". Bingo!, your file is cut in pieces.

The verdict
In a sense, VideoRedo has two critical advantages over other more expensive editors: Its speed, due to the disk-based "fast frame copy" technique used, and its low cost. But just mentioning these two points would be an understatement. The videoredo author and tech support team do a good job and in the rare case the program choked on a certain video file, you are told to upload the "problem file" to the company's FTP server and the cause of the problem is often found and fixed in a couple days, with a new program build released if needed. But most of the time you don't need to go that far, the VideoRedo "Quick fix" tool takes care of problem/buggy MPEG streams most of the time. One thing to keep in mind: The version tested works with MPEG1 and MPEG2 compressed (.mpg) video _only_.

The relative low cost and ease of use makes this program a lifesaver for someone doing quick DVD/MPEG2 and MPEG1/web video editing both professionally or even occasionally on Windows computers. The good news for the linux/opensource crowd is that On the Linux world you don't have to pay a dime for similar software, as there are open source tools out there that provide comparable video chopping functionality for free, both in the sense of Freedom and Free Beer. The Gnome based tool "GOPchop" is one example. Find it here.

I give VideoRedo four and a half Fernandos in my personal one to five rating scale. It does what it promises and it does so much faster compared to other MPEG video editors I've used in the past. You don't see this kind of power/price/simplcity ratio in the Windows world too often. µ