[mythtv-users] shrinkage pros and cons (was Re: MPEG4 bigger than MPEG2?)

[Raymond Wagner]

On 3/10/2012 17:46, Ross Boylan wrote:
> Could you say a little more about the mechanics of creating the cutlist?
> Particularly if doing it from scratch, I think I'd need to step through
> the whole program, which seems as if it would be slow.  Although I guess
> if you step a minute at a time that's only 30 steps for a half hour
> show--maybe not so bad.
>
> In my experiment I went into edit mode, loaded the commercial list (Z),
> and then used page up and down  to step through the cuts and the arrow
> keys to see if the area around them looked OK.  The cuts before I
> tweaked actually were pretty good; the only problems I noticed were that
> the cut areas could have been a few seconds bigger in some cases, and
> the final credits got skipped (since the picture at the time was mostly
> an ad, with the credits in a small area at the bottom, a pretty tough
> case).  Of course if there were ads in the middle of an area marked as
> program I would never see it with that procedure.  The slightly small
> cuts are probably a good thing, since it makes it easy to tell that
> nothing important has been cut while you're watching.

There was a significant change in the cutlist editor a little over a 
year ago, and I wrote an example of the new workflow for people who were 
too used to the old.

http://www.mythtv.org/pipermail/mythtv-users/2010-December/305338.html

The commercial detection is often very accurate, and in those cases, 
importing it can make things go faster.  It helps to have additional 
buttons mapped to pageup/pagedown to allow you to skip between cutpoints 
without having to change your seek duration.  Use the keyframe and 
single frame durations to set the precise point, and maybe do a quick 
scan at twenty seconds or one minute to make sure there weren't any 
false detections.

If the commercial detection happens to not be accurate, importing the 
skip list is just going to fill your cutlist with garbage, and it's 
easier to start from scratch.  As mentioned, I do most of my editing 
these days from my desktop.  With a keyboard capable of 6-10 
keys-per-second, compared to IR at maybe two keys-per-second, it's just 
as fast to not bother loading the skip list and just do it manually, 
since I would be skimming back through the recording to confirm the 
accuracy anyway.