Time Code Breaks and MpegStreamClip

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...