Split HD MOV video withing PSE8?

[angelah100]

I have five large files (40gb each), hd video, in MOV format (old home movies that were professionally digitized). I want to manually split the files into video clips so that I can use PSE8's organizer to tag each clip. Afterward I will use the tags to recombine the clips and create HD DVDs. In this way, I can make a DVD with the clips containing video of our neighbors and give it to them, a DVD with video only of my mom's side of the family and give it to them, etc. I have looked thru PSE8 and can't find this functionality anywhere but maybe I'm not looking in the right place. Does anyone know?

[RJ Johnston]

The only thing that I have tried that splits HD MOV (.h264) files into separate files without transcoding again (direct copy) is HandySaw DS version 4.3. I had to also install Klite Codec Pack and then enable the h264/AVC codec in the FFDShow DirectShow filters. HandySaw DS is kind of expensive, around $68.00. It will do optical scene recognition which you can fine tune before actually creating separate files. After the scenes are marked off, you can sit back as Handysaw creates separate files for each scene.

The other alternative method is using Quicktime 7 with the Pro license. You could then select a region and do a Save-As. Very tedious. You have to do one scene at a time.

[angelah100]

HandySaw sounds pretty good but it's about $75 now with the current exchange rate. Still, it would save me heaps of time in the long run. Thanks for your reply.

[angelah100]

HandySaw works really well at splitting the scenes. I'm amazed at how well it found the start/finish of each scene without having datetime stamps. However, I got an error when it tried to save the results:
DS Error: Not enough storage is available to complete this operation. File HSDScore.cpp Line: 3093 (which repeated itself many many times, I assume it repeated for each scene it tried to create). Am not sure why I got this error since I have over 500GB available in the file location, maybe because I only have about 120gb on the c drive? Have emailed tech support so hopefully will hear back soon. RJ, did you have any problems like this? How big were the files that you split?

[RJ Johnston]

Hi Angelah100, I haven't seen that error message. I've split MPEG-2 files that are up to 4 GB in file size, and I've split DV-AVI files up to about 10 GB.

[Chuck Engels]

I wonder if it could be the paging file (virtual memory) maximum that is the problem?

[Bob]

That it says "storage" instead of "memory" makes me think it has to do with available space on a drive rather than the paging file. The target drive for saving the files may be the 500GB drive, but there are likely a lot of temporary files that it's placing on the C: drive. If there's a disk space shortage, the C: drive would be my bet.

[Chuck Engels]

A brilliant deduction Mr. Holmes, ..... I mean... Bob

[angelah100]

I received a response from HandySaw and I was using the wrong engine - I needed the ffmeg (sp?) instead of the other one. The program tried to create uncompressed AVI files which are enormous and there wasn't enough room on the destination drive for them. This program has many nice features but the Help file could be a bit better. I didn't see anything in the Help file that provided any guidance on splitter engines.

So I split my file without errors but the resulting split files have the video compressed into the top half of the frame (the bottom half is blank, black). I didn't think that the program re-rendered each scene but it must have. I have another email to Dmitry at their tech support but am pretty sure that I received an 'out of office' reply (in Russian). Will have to wait until he returns to figure this one out. To be sure that it wasn't a problem with that particular file, tried to split a different MOV file, similar size (25GB) into 260 scenes but the results were the same. I remain optimistic about the program however. I'm still impressed with its ability to optically recognize scenes, and hope I can get this working as it would be great to have these giant files split into smaller clips that I can tag and organize.

[angelah100]

Dmitry has suggested that I use HandySaw and export to Final Cut XML. He said that I can use the XML file within Premiere, and that Premiere wil 'see' multiple clips but in reality it will be the orginal MOV clip coordinated with the XML file. However, I don't see any way to do this from within Premiere. The Premire Help file only references XML files for tags and comments. When I try to import the XML file (using 'get media'), Premiere says that the file type is not supported.

Have any of you used the XML file along with a single video file where Premiere interprets the two as multiple clips?

[Bob]

He's thinking you have Premiere Pro. That's not a supported feature in Premiere Elements.

Have you tried RJ Johnston's suggestion to install the Klite Codec Pack and then enable the h264/AVC codec in the FFDShow DirectShow filters?

[angelah100]

Yes, that was one of the first things that I did before using the program. However I think that only matters if I am using the DirectShow engine which exports to AVI (correct me if I am wrong, RJ). There isn't enough room for uncompressed AVI files (thus the orginal error). My goal is to split an HD MOV file into HD MOV scenes, preferably some sort of splitting of the orginal file without actually rendering or compressing it. I may have to compress to a different file type though, unless Dmitry can figure out why the program is behaving this way with my files.

[angelah100]

Just a quick update -
Unbelievably, the people (Dmitry?) that made HandySaw have actually modified their program based on what they learned from my problem. I've tested their new Beta version and it works perfectly in splitting my MOV file. The new version (which Dmitry says will be released to everyone soon) contains more Quicktime options. That's incredible tech support!

[Chuck Engels]

That's great news Angela and good to hear such nice things about the Handysaw people.
Thanks for keeping us updated on your progress and the solution that is on the way