Combine files on Samsung camcorder

[Kayoss]

Hi, I bought the Samsung H300 a while back and i really think im missing a trick here. When recording, each time i begin/stop recording, a seperate file is created. The camera itself does then give you the option to combine files but it only allows you to do them one at time. This becomes extremely time consuming when you've got over 100 different files to combine.

Is there a way to merge/combine multiple files at once? I've tried to find a solution on google but have found nothing. There is software that comes with the camera yet i don't see any option to combine files. I'm happy to use 3rd party software if need be, but they tend to take hours to combine the files whilst the camera itself can combine 2 files in seconds.

Am i missing something here? Surely Samsung would'nt make it so hard to do something so important. Any help would be appriciated.

Thanks

 

[fvdbergh]

You did not specify a platform, though that hardly matters if you are looking for an open source solution.

If you merely want to combine the video clips without any editing, then mencoder (part of the mplayer package) can do exactly that: combine multiple clips without reencoding them --- I have managed this for h.264 encoded .mp4 files using the "-copy" option. This is likely to work for only a few formats, though, and you will have to go command line.

I found that adding simple cross-fades makes for a much more pleasing final video, though. This requires an actual video editing tool. I have not found anything open source for Windows. On Linux I use kdenlive --- it is simple to use, and actually works well once you have seen a 5 minute tutorial. Of course, if you add fades between the clips you have to re-encode, which may affect quality, but will definitely take much longer, but certainly not hours if you are using x264 to encode. I'd be happy to provide more information if you are willing to give this a try.

 

[Kayoss]

Thanks for the reply but i'm using windows. The files are essentially just mp4 so there are many software tools that can be used to combine them, even windows live movie maker. Problem is this process is really time consuming and tends to inflate the file size.

Where i am most confused is how this can happen at all. Surely Samsung must provide a simple solution to my problem? Who records on their camera without ever pressing stop? I feel as tho im being foolish and just missing something simple. At least i hope thats the case...

 

[MongooseMan]

Pretty much all cameras/camcorders do this.
Think of it from the other perspective, if you wanted to get get a bunch of clips you'd be very pissed if they all got joined together into one long video.
At the end of the day it's easier to join clips, rather than try to separate them.

As far as software goes, if you don't mind hard-cuts between clips, maybe try virtualdub (not sure if it works with mp4, but worth a google at least).

 

[fvdbergh]

Thanks for the reply but i'm using windows.

Try this:
mencoder -oac copy -ovc copy -idx -o output.mp4 video1.mp4 video2.mp4 video3.mp4

This will be lightning quick, but there may be a risk of audio/video sync going off a bit. But try it!

You can grab a win32 copy of mplayer/mencoder here: http://oss.netfarm.it/mplayer-win32.php (look for a link "Download MPlayer/MEncoder svn rev 34401" or similar).

Where i am most confused is how this can happen at all. Surely Samsung must provide a simple solution to my problem?

Nope. I think that they expect people to use full-blown editing software to add fades, titles, etc. But like I said, I could not find a nice free one for Windows when I last looked about 2 years ago.

 

[Vegeta]

Nope. I think that they expect people to use full-blown editing software to add fades, titles, etc. But like I said, I could not find a nice free one for Windows when I last looked about 2 years ago.

Windows Movie Maker?

 

[fvdbergh]

Windows Movie Maker?

I seem to recall that it only outputs .WMV files (probably encoded with MS VC1). Sure, you could probably use it to output high-quality video and then reconvert it to .mp4, but once you go open source you get access to something like ffmpeg, giving you many, many output options.

 

[Kayoss]

Thanks for all the answers, will give it a try later when im back at home.