Now that I’ve recorded eleven holiday specials, I need to find some time to edit the recordings using MyDVD. As you can imagine this is going to be a tedious process.
Needless to say, I don’t think I will have it done before Christmas. In the past I never had to edit out commercials because all of the content that I’ve wanted to put on a DVD didn’t have commercials. In the past, all I really needed to do was adjust the start and end times. Now that I have eleven recordings all with commercials I need to come up with an efficient way to edit out the content that I don’t want. I think I may use the “find scenes” feature in MyDVD however, I’m not sure how this works.
Does anybody have any experience editing TiVo recordings in MyDVD? Are there any recommendations for editing a large number of recordings like I need to do?
Just locate & cut them manually, thats what I do. Commercials are in blocks, there aren’t that many blocks in a show.
Personally I use Nero (which sucks at video editing) so I can’t help you specifically with MyDVD. But I can tell you waht I do.
I use Nero to convert the TiVo file to a non TiVo file (I suggest that you convert to DVD spec MPEG2 (a setting in Nero at least) so your program doesn’t have to do a second transcoding to burn to DVD).
Once it’s in a regular MPEG2 file you can use any number of video editing & DVD authoring programs that do a much better job (honestly I forget what I use but I know it’s some kind of oepn source program).
Then you can burn your new files to DVD, if you did the initial conversion right you don’t have to do a second transcoding (which takes time and can degrade quality).
Robert,
It would be great if you documented your entire process on your blog. Let me know if you do. I would be interested in reading it.
I don’t have a lot of experience editing videos or burning DVDs so I pretty much went with MyDVD because it seems like the easiest option.
Alex,
I have just started editing tivo recordings, i am currently using tvharmony’s tivo2mpeg converter to get it in a working format. Just as Robert A. I use nero 7 to edit out the unwanted content. this however is not the esiest. tvharmony has a feature to remove commercials, i have used it but im not convinced it works without flaws. right now here is my process.
The file sizes and processing time is for 30min tivo recording. starting file size is ~820,000kb
1) convert tivo to mpeg (~
Rob K,
Please repost your comment. It looks as though it may have gotten chopped off….
Alex,
I have just started editing tivo recordings, i am currently using tvharmony’s tivo2mpeg converter to get it in a working format. Just as Robert A. I use nero 7 to edit out the unwanted content. this however is not the esiest. tvharmony has a feature to remove commercials, i have used it but im not convinced it works without flaws. right now here is my process.
The file sizes and processing time is for 30min tivo recording. starting file size is ~820,000kb
1) convert tivo to mpeg using tvharmony’s tool (~ 5min)
2) use nero 7 option to create your own dvd. here you can cut out comercials and you cut them as clean as you want to. (~5-10min)
3) after you are done cutting unwanted section you can either export to a new mpeg file or directly burn to a dvd. exporting takes close to real time so for a 30min show without comercials your looking at just over 20min.
4) once you have multiple mpegs ready to burn you can create menus in nero 7 using the create your own dvd feature.
the total process for a 30min show takes about 30-40 min, which shounds time consuming. but if i remember the tvharmony comskip takes about the same amount of time. the final file size reduces slightly around 780,000kb.
i am still perfecting this i will keep you up to date.
After several years of using Adobe’s Premiere (now Premiere-Pro) to edit video I was shocked to realize that Tivo’s files are another animal and not readible by Premiere. TVHarmony was too slow and cumbersome tho’ it was free. I eventually learned that Roxio MyDVD Suite 8 is the “official” editing software condoned by TiVo. So I bought it – it is unable to handle very large files that get downloaded from TiVo – the winter Olympics for example are 3 to 4 hours a night with a lot of sports I am not interested in (I recorded it for the figure skating). I used to simply record to a VCR but that means going from digital to analog to digital with a loss of quality. I can record a 3 hour TiVo file, but Roxio’s product is unable to handle it – just the simple act of making a “split” (razor cut) seems to involve Roxio’s having to rewrite the entire 3 hour (about 11 gig) file, and it gets hung up and the entire computer freezez and often has to be rebooted with the cold reboot button – what a mess! Today I discovered another product called VideoReDo Plus and it works better than I could have hoped for: it reads the entire TiVo file no matter how long, it has an “ad-detective” that unerringly finds every commercial (hasn’t made a mistake yet), deletes them, and leaves me with a commercial-free result that takes only 10 or 15 minutes to save to an MPEG video file that is easily burned to a DVD. Sections of the TiVo file can easily be cut out and them program never hangs. It doesn’t seem to use much memory in operation. I have no interest (financial or otherwise) in the company – the trial version is available for a 15 day trial, but it will only save 30 minutes of the final product so it’s just that, a trial. After an hour of trial use, I bought the package.
Barry
Anything new on this thread. My 2 and 4 year olds are fascinated with a couple of shows. I want to transfer them to DVD But I dont want to have all the commercials etc. . . MyDVD implodes every time I try to cut out the commercials and intros. Sucktacular performance. It’s not like my CPU is overloaded, the program has bugs.
Anybody have a suggestion?
I use VideoReDo to edit out commercials. Works great for me. Also, it will open .tivo files without converting beforehand.
Tony,
Thanks for letting me know about VideoReDo. I’ll have to give it a try.
Does any know how to put the description of the movie or tv program that TIVO does. After I removed the commericals of the programs I recorded and stuck them on my PC drive the description doesn’t come up on Tivo anymore. Are there any programs out there to fix this issue