For those who have played around with video editing - by now all the illusions about just how easy it is supposed to be with all the tools around must be broken. For me it was a big surprise to learn just how fragile and laborious this supposedly simple task can be. Leaving aside the multiple gotchas in the whole process, let me describe just 1 significant one.
While trying to import a movie clip that played normally in VideoLan into Windows Movie Maker(WMM), I found that WMM would import only the first few seconds of the clip. Repeated attempts failed and while investigating further I found that the movie duration was being misread for some reason. Even VideoLan, while playing it correctly, showed the total duration to be just the number seconds that I was able to import into WMM. Further investigation led me to the world of 'time code breaks'.
My investigations also provided an excellent tool to fix this problem - just in case you face it too. MpegStreamClip is a free tool that makes short work of time code breaks enabling one to import files broken this way - a truly significant life saver...
Incidentally the latest version of VideoLan has fully integrated file transcoding facilities. However, it looked like the codecs used were still not very stable.
A really capable alternative to VideoLan transcoding turns out to be NCH Prism Video Converter. Modular in design and function with a good capable UI - Prism functions like a charm mostly...
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