Purchase - Womble Multimedia, Inc.

2. How to cut out commercials with/without a 'Cut'?

One of the most frequent operations for editing an MPEG movie is to edit out all commercials in a TV show recording. The following are steps to do this quickly using the Input Monitor with the cut function.

1. Open the MPEG file in the Input monitor.

2. Set the monitor to full screen display mode.

3. Set the play speed to I-only by pressing the speed button twice (or the 'S' key).

4. Press the Space bar to start the fast play (or the 'A' and 'D' keys).

5. Use the mouse scroll wheel to stop the player and to mark a segment to be deleted.

6. Press the trim cut button (or the 'X' key) to remove the selected segment.

7. Repeat the last 3 steps above for all the segments that you want to be removed.

8. Restore the input monitor to its layout size.

9. To add the remaining program segments to the Timeline, press the 'G' key which is the keyboard shortcut for the menu selection for "Put to Timeline".

10. You can save the remaining program segments to an MPEG file using the "Trim" function from the context menu of the Input monitor.

NOTE: The method below was suggested when the Input monitor did NOT have the cut function, which is true for all versions before the October 2006 update release. With the cut function available, the method listed below becomes awkward, and the information below are only instructional as a usage illustration of the Input monitor.

The following is one way to cut out commercials of an MPEG recording using the Input monitor and the video clipboard, without a 'cut' function.

1. Open the MPEG file in the Input monitor.

2. Set the input monitor to full screen display mode.

3. Set the play speed to I-only ('F') by pressing the speed button twice (or the 'S' key).

4. Press the Space bar to start the fast play (or the 'A' and 'D' keys).

5. Use the mouse scroll wheel to stop the player and to mark the segment you want to keep.

6. Select the "Add to Clips" from the monitor menu (right mouse click) to save the segment to the video clipboard in the project manager.

7. Repeat the last 3 steps above for all the segments of a show.

8. Restore the input monitor to its layout size.

9. Select all the clips in the "Clips->Video" page in the project manager.

10. Drag and drop them on to the Timeline to save the segments to a single file, or;

10a. Drag and drop them on to the Batch of the Trim Manager to save the clips to separate files.

Using the full screen and the I-only fast play, it takes about 5 to 10 minutes to complete the editing of a 2 hour movie.