HomePage 3 of 5: Cutting Out Commercials
Section 2C: Cutting Out Commercials
One neat feature of MPEG Video Wizard is the ability to quickly detect scene that fade to black. This is useful if you want to find all the cuts to commercials within the video so you can promptly remove them. To do this, we will use MVW bookmark browser's "BlankFades" feature to do this quickly.
Drag the input video into the "Input" preview area. Right click on this area and select "BookMark Browser" to open up the bookmark browser window.
Now right click in the Bookmark Browser window area and select "Settings". Here, you can adjust the "BlankFades" settings - these will determine how many fades are detected, and which types of fades won't be included. Close this window when done and go back to the main Bookmark Browser area. Click on the "BlankFades" button to start the process, which can take several minutes. When it is done, you should have quite a few "bookmarks" of scenes where fades have been detected. We will then drag the video onto the timeline using the "Drag" button - just click on this button, hold it and then drag it onto the timeline's video track (the top most track). You can now close the Bookmark Browser.
Notice now on the timeline the many sections where fades - the BlankFades function divided the video whenever there was a fade, so you can easily see where the commercials may be. Use the "+" button to the right of the timeline to zoom in to have a better view. The "sections" that appear regularly and are regular in size are most likely the areas containing the commercials. You can double click on each section to play the video in the "Input" window and make sure it is a commercial break. Make sure to check any small segments just before and after, as these may be part of the commercial break too.
To delete the commercial breaks, simply click on the section you want to delete and press the "Delete" key on your keyboard (or right-click on the section, select "Cut"). Repeat this for every commercial break. Now we'll have ugly gaps where the commercials used to be - to fix this, right click on one of the gaps in the timeline and select "Clear All Gaps".
You can check the output to make sure everything is fine by using the playback controls in the "Output" preview area. Note the marker on the timeline (the yellow upside down triangle, with a vertical line down the timeline) that will show you on the timeline which part of the output is being played at the current time.
When you're done, click on the red record button (which is actually the "Export" button), and you can then save the now joined MPEG file. To check to see if re-encoding was necessary, click on the "Detail" button, which opens up a new "Export MPEG detail information" window - the blue area shows the part of the video that won't need re-encoding (stream copy), the red areas is the parts that need to be re-encoded.
Save the file as a new, commercial free, MPG file.
