Womble MPEG Video Wizard - Basic Video Editing Guide

Womble MPEG Video Wizard is a MPEG video editing tool that has gained popularity for its relatively simple interface and quick editing. Editing MPEG files is often necessary when it comes to producing home made DVDs, to compile your holiday videos into a coherent package. Many DVD authoring tools come with basic editing capabilities, but these are often slow, lacking in features, or too buggy to be of any real use. This is where MPEG Video Wizard (and MPEG Video Wizard DVD) comes in and becomes useful.

This guide is designed for beginners to video editing, and it will go through some of the most basic operations, such as cutting, joining and removing commercials. The second part of this guide will feature taking a real life example and going through the editing process step by step to cover some of the more advanced features. However, video editing in itself is a fairly advanced topic, so if this is not for those who have never handled digital video files on computers before (in other words, you probably should already have some experience converting videos and such, but not necessarily have any experience with video editing).

Womble MPEG Video Wizard DVD also features DVD authoring and menu creation capabilities, but this will be covered in another guide to be written soon.

Software you'll need:

• Womble MPEG Video Wizard or Womble MPEG Video Wizard DVD

Section 1: Installation and Layout

Installing Womble MPEG Video Wizard (or MPEG Video Wizard DVD) is easy. Just use the installer and follow the instructions. Once it is installed, start MPEG Video Wizard. The layout of the software is show in the screenshot below:

The "Source" section is where your editing material can be found. This includes video, audio files and clips, effects plugins, and saved projects. The "Input" and "Output" windows provide video previews. The "Timeline" is where most of the editing will take place. The "Taskbar" contains links to some frequently used functions, such as the export tool, title tool, some MPEG tools (mux, demux) and in MVW DVD, the DVD authoring tool. Get familiar with these sections and the terms I've used to describe them, which will be used throughout the rest of this guide.

Section 2A: MPEG Video Joining

One of the most commonly asked questions, at least in our forums, is the ability to join MPEG video files without having to re-encode everything. MVW allows you to do this quickly and easily.

The "proper" process is to load your input video sources (the files you want to join) into the "Source" window. To load a video into the source window, simply drag the video file into this area, or right click and select "Import Items". Once loaded into the source window, proceed to drag the loaded videos onto the timeline. A shortcut (and especially useful if you're not planning on re-using the input videos in other parts of the project) is to simply drag the input video files directly onto the timeline's video track (the top most track), without going through the process of adding them to the source window first. Either way will work here. Simply repeat this for every video file you want to join, in the order you want to join them:

Once the video is on the timeline, you can press the "+" or "-" buttons to the right to zoom in and out of the timeline area, so you can have a better view of the timeline.

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.

If you wish, you can also add effects between the joined videos. Click on the "Effects" tab in the "Source" area, and select one of the many available 2D or 3D effects. This can be helpful if the joining point between two videos is too abrupt, and you want to add in some effects to make the transition better on the eye. Single mouse click on any effect to preview what it looks like, and to use this effect, simply drag it onto the timeline between any two clips. It's a little bit hard to see the effect on the timeline, so you may need to zoom in a bit. A join without an effect will appear as a vertical line between the two videos. An effect will appear as a diagonal line instead (see screenshots below - the marker, is also shown in the screenshots below). Again, preview the output to see if you're happy with the effect on the actual video.

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 (it can be if input files do not have the same video and audio properties), 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. If you added in any effects, then the effects part will need to be re-encoded.

Save the file as a new MPG file, and in a while, joining will be complete.

Section 2B: MPEG Video Cutting

MPEG video cutting is a similarly popular discussion topic. MPEG cutting follows a similar procedure to MPEG joining above. Again, you can choose to import items to the source window, or this time you can drag the video you want to cut straight to the "Input" window (not the "Timeline").

The controls under the preview video area allows you to navigate to parts of the video - the play button simply plays the video, but the "Next" and "Previous" buttons allows you to skip to the next and previous frames, frame by frame, or hold down these buttons to skip through faster. Go to where you want to start the cut (hover your mouse over these buttons to find out what they are) and press the "Mark In" button. Then go to the part where you want to end the cut and press the "Mark Out" button. Press the "Cut" button to cut the marked area. Alternatively, you can also choose to mark in and out the scenes you want to keep, and then use the "Trim Left" and "Trim Right" buttons to remove the parts to the left and right of the marked area (or even easier, simply with the area you want to keep marked in green, proceed to drag to timeline as described and only the part marked will be added to the timeline).

Once you're done with editing, move your mouse to within the preview video area, and then drag it onto the timeline. If you've cut a piece of the video in the middle, then the video will appear as two separate clips on the timeline. 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 - see screenshot below) 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 MPG file, and in a while, the cut MPEG file will emerge.

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.

Section 3A: Real World Example Walkthrough Part 1: Loading Source + Removing Ads

Video editing is as much an art as it is a science. Creativity will determine how and what you want to do with your video, and that's hard to cover in a guide. What I can do, however, is to provide a walk-through of a real world sample project, going through the steps that I took to edit a video for eventual authoring to DVD. It won't cover every aspect of MPEG Video Wizard, but hopefully it should give you a fair idea of what you can achieve with the software so you can test it out for yourself and let your own creativity take over.

The example I am using is the Finale episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation ("All Good Things ..."). There are two episodes, and also an end of series special on the making of TNG. All in all, 3 videos of around 45 minutes each, but these were recorded (using my DVD recorder) from TV and so they have commercial breaks. As they are recorded using my DVD recorder, the files are already in DVD compliant MPEG-2 format, which simplifies matters. The idea is to eventually assembled these three videos onto a custom made DVD, but before that, the video will need to be imported into MPEG Video Wizard, edited to remove the commercials and title screens added before episode 1, and then have each video rendered rendered back out as MPEG-2 files ready to use in my DVD authoring tool. In a later guide, I will also show you how to use Womble MPEG Video Wizard DVD to author the DVD directly.

The commercial removing function has already been explained previously, but I will go through the process step by step again in more detail here with a real example. The title screen will be added in front of the first episode in the finale, and it will be white text on a black background with background music (of the TNG theme) extracted from the episode itself, and then all fading into the start of the episode.

Okay, let's get started. As mentioned previously, I have a DVD of the three segments as recorded by my DVD recorder. I will have to first import the DVD files into MPEG Video Wizard. Start MPEG Video Wizard, and click on the "File" tab in the source window, and click on the "Video" button. Right click on the file list area and select "Import Items" and navigate to the (non encrypted) DVD disc. Go into the "VIDEO_TS" folder and several VOB files should be listed. The screenshot below shows 3 VTS sets, each with 2 VOB files - these 3 sets are the 3 segments, and they occupy two VOB files each due to the file size limit placed on VOB files (VOB files must be under 1 GB each). Load all of the VOB files into MPEG Video Wizard - this step may take a few minutes as MVW reads your VOB files. Alternatively, you can copy all unencryted DVD files to your hard-disk first using Windows Explorer and then import them into MVW from your HDD - this avoids constant drive access and will make things a bit faster (albeit at the expense of wasting a bit of time copying everything to the HDD).

Once loaded into the source area, you can drag the various thumbnails around to get them into the right order - it's not strictly necessary, but it makes things a bit easier to find.

We'll now proceed to remove the commercial breaks from the loaded videos, and to join the two files per segment into one file that is saved on the hard-drive for easier future access. Drag VTS_01_1 (the first VOB file of the first episode in the finale) into the "Input" preview window - it should start playing, press the "pause" button to pause playback. Then, right click on the video in the preview window and select "BookMark Browser". Click on the "BlankFades" button in the newly opened Bookmark Browser window to detect the commercial breaks.

You should now have a list of bookmarks shown in the video, we'll now just drag all these clips onto the video track timeline (the top most track in the Timeline window), using the orange "Drag" button. The timeline should now be populated with the VTS_01_1 video, but now divided into several segments whenever fades were detected (fades may indicate commercial breaks). As mentioned earlier in the guide, the "sections" that appear regularly and are regular in size are most likely the areas containing the commercials. The smaller segments around these possible commercial segments may also be part of the commercial break. To be able to see the timeline in more detail, use the "+" button to the right of the timeline to zoom in.

The screenshot above showed two possible commercial breaks, and double clicking on these segments will start playback of them in the "Input" window, and they were determined to be commercial breaks. For the first commercial break pointed to in the screenshot above, there was also a tiny segment just after it that was also part of the commercial break. Click on each of these ad segments, press the "Delete" key on your keyboard to delete them. The timeline now looks like this:

Now right click on one of the gaps in the timeline, and select the "Clear All Gaps" option to clear all gaps in the timeline. Now to do the same with the second file for the first episode (VTS_01_2). Again, drag the file into the "Input" window, go to the "BookMark Browser" and use the "BlankFades" option to detect all the fades, drag onto the timeline (leave a little gap between the video already on the timeline so you don't get confused as to what you are editing - just drag to a spot a bit further away from the video already on the timeline), and then proceed to find and remove the commercial breaks from this second part (turns out to be 3 segments in the middle that were part of the commercial break - see screenshots). And finally, clear the gaps (this will also clear the gap between the first part of episode 1 and the second part) - the screenshots below demonstrate the steps.

So far everything has been for the first episode in the finale only - I previewed the output using the output window to make sure everything is fine (you may need to close the "Bookmark Browser" window to better see the output window), and then press the red record button (the Export button) to the right of the timeline to save the file - I saved the file as "TNG - Finale Ep 1.mpg". Ideally, we would actually do further editing here (ie. adding the title screens) before outputting to a MPG file, so you can for example skip saving this file and processing the other two videos (episode 2 and the "TNG Special") and skip forward to the next page to create a title screen for episode 1, and then come back to the other two videos. But for the clarity of the guide, I'll waste a bit of time (and HDD space) to save the commercial free MPG files first (which is also a good idea if you're still working off your original DVD disc at this stage, as after saving the MPG files to your HDD, you can put the disc safely away and avoid the constant disc access).

Next, I repeat the same steps above but for episode two and the "TNG special", following basically the exact same steps. I ended up with 3 .mpg files, as you can see in the screenshot below:

I can now delete the VTS_0x_x files from the source window, and replace them with the file for the first episode, to get ready to add a title screen to it.

Section 3B: Real World Example Walkthrough Part 2: Creating Titles

We'll now create title screens for episode 1. As mentioned previously, we'll create a title screen consisting of white text on black background with a small section of the TNG music theme as the background, and then it all fades into the start of the episode.

To get a clip of the TNG theme, we'll have to extract a clip of the video (from episode 1) containing the theme.

First, drag the file "TNG - Finale Ep 1" to the Input window. Use the input controls to mark in and out the segment of music that needs to be extracted (add a couple of second before and after), and then with the segment marked in green in the Input window, drag the video onto the timeline, but into the "Music track" section (the third track). If the timeline is not clear of all items, you can click on the "New Project" icon (or press Ctrl+N) to clear the timeline.

If you prefer to save this music track to an audio file, just use the "Export" button to save it to a WAV or AC3 file - it's more organised this way, especially if you plan on re-using the music file later on, but unnecessary for the purpose of this guide.

Now we'll create a title. To do this, from the "Taskbar", click on the "Title Editor" button.

This opens up the title editor. Click on the "BKColor" button and change the background colour to black. Click and hold the text colour button and change the colour to white. Change the font options to whatever fits your need, and click on the title preview window to the right to start typing. When you have finished creating your title, you can save this, or simply use the drag button to drag the title to the title track on the timeline (the second track).

Note that the title and audio track don't have the same length - you can adjust either so they match, and I have made the title longer in my example - to increase the length, just drag at one end on the timeline.

Now, drag the file "TNG - Finale Ep 1" from the source window onto the movie timeline and the move it (drag the object on the timeline and move) so that it intersects the title track near the end of the title (see screenshot below). You can now play the project using the Output window, notice the rather abrupt end to the title track, and the beginning of the episode proper. We'll fix this by using the fade in/out option.

Right click on the object on the title track, and select "Fade". This opens the "Clip Fades" window, which allows you to adjust the fade in and fade out settings for this object. What we want is to have the title fade in from black, and then fade out just as the episode begins. The "Get Default" button can be useful, as it sets fade in/out at 1 second each (the fade will begin and end for 1 second at the beginning, and at the end) - you can adjust to suit your needs.

We need to do the same to the music track, let's not forget. You might want to set a longer fade out for the music track as it will sound better. You might even want to add fade in to the episode video as well.

Now if you didn't have transparencies enabled for the title track, then you might notice the transition between the title and the video still isn't very nice looking - the video sort of pauses while the title fades away. But if you enable transparencies, you'll get a much nicer effect as the title text for a brief moment is superimposed on the episode video. To enable transparencies, right click on the title track on the timeline again, and select "Transparency". Click "Use Transparent Color" - the option "Automatic select mass color in the image" will select the biggest block of colour (in our case, it's the black background) as the color that will be transparent, otherwise you can choose a different color instead. Click OK and test the output - it looks much nicer, doesn't it?

And that's all there is to adding a title, that will fade into the video and be semi-transparent at various points, with a background music track. Sounds complicated, but easy to do in Womble MPEG Video Wizard. Export the now edited video out to a new MPG file (note that some parts will now require re-encoding, if you click on the "Details" button in the export save file window - the re-encoded part is the actual title).

If the input files you had were not VCD/DVD compliant MPEG-1/MPEG-2 files and you want to make them so, that's not too hard either. When you press the "Export" button and the window asking you where to save the file comes up (this is where the "Details" button was), you can change the "Save as Type" setting from "Automatic (*.mpg)" to one of the pre-defined templates (for example, "DVD PAL" - you can press the "Template" button to look at the encoding settings of each template, and even make your own templatess). In my example, if I wanted to re-encode my entire video, I would select "DVD PAL" as that's the format and video system I want my final DVD to be. Note that once I selected this new "save as type" setting, and went back to the "Details" screen, my entire video now requires encoding (see screenshot). If I wanted to reverse this (that is, to go back to the status above where I don't need to re-encode anything other than the title screen, I would change "Save as Type" back to "Automatic (.*mpg)".

This completes this basic video editing guide. As you can see, your imagination is really the limit when it comes to video editing, and hopefully this guide has given you a good starting point to create your own video projects. Good luck!

Got more questions? Post them in our Womble Software Forum and get them answered by other expert users. The specific discussion thread for this article can be found here.