What to do with Camcorder DV Video?
Optional “Append AVIs” Step
(This is the first step you would do when processing subsequent batches of files).
Because Camcorder’s create a new “take” every time you start/stop recording, an optional step I do at this point is to glue all the source AVI’s together that correspond to a single date or event to form a single AVI containing all the takes. This means that when viewing them later I can view the whole event as a single movie rather than having to select them take by take in the right order as I watch them on the TV. This has to be done prior to compression as Virtual Dub struggles to glue the files together after (some problem related to the bitrates varying between the different files that I didn’t really understand other than that they needed to exactly match and didn’t). Hence, I stick ’em together before compression.
This is done in Virtual Dub by opening the first AVI in the usual way “File->Open”. Then select “File-Append AVI” for each subsequent AVI clip you want to add.
Select “Video->Direct Stream Copy”, and
select “Audio->Direct Stream Copy”.
Then select “File-Save As AVI”, give it a filename – and hey presto, one new file that is the content of all the original clips simply stuck together.